I'm struggling with an issue, and I'm hoping that someone has some ideas ...

I'm using a "search engine friendly" menu system.  That means that every page name appears in every page.  That's nice, but ... when the site gets indexed, that also means that I get TONS of references to pages.  This basically makes my site index useless because you can't find things in the forest of page names.

Is there a "good" way to handle this?  Specifically, it would be nice to suppress indexing page name when repeated in menus, but this seems basically impossible.

Any good ideas?

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Joe Craig
Patapsco Research Group, Ellicott City, MD
DotNetNuke Development and Services (http://patapscorg.com)

I am using the DDR Menu from DNNGarden as the menu and I'm using a mega menu template, not that it matters. I'm also using a variant of it to create a "fat footer." The menus are rendered as unordered lists and styled to get the desired appearance and behavior. Thus, the page names are part of the page's HTML. I am using Xepient Open Search for the site search. Open Search spiders the site. Therefore, it picks up all of the page names and indexes them. One of the site's features is a set of dynamically rendered pages (about 2200 of them) that contain bibliographical information about publications that are stored in a database. We want/need those publication citatations to be indexed. But, we end up with 2200 citations and an equal number of references to page names. So, if there is a page with "Coal" in its name, and there are references to coal in the publications, the few publication references get lost in a sea of page references. I'm looking for ways to have a site search that is meaningful. One suggestion, from the Xepient site was to HTML encode the first character in each word in all of the page names. That has a number of side effects that aren't good, but that technique works. I'm looking for a better way. There are some ad hoc things out there that involve tags that some search engines obey, and that others do not. Xepient Open Search appears not to do anything like that. So ... good ideas are welcome.

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Joe Craig
Patapsco Research Group, Ellicott City, MD
DotNetNuke Development and Services (http://patapscorg.com)

Well, now ...

That's a terriffic idea!

I'm off to try it out.  If it works, I may fly over and buy you a pint (or several) on Sept. 10!

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Joe Craig
Patapsco Research Group, Ellicott City, MD
DotNetNuke Development and Services (http://patapscorg.com)