Ivan ; to address the specific questions about the Url Master module:

- yes, it does both Friendly Url Generation, and 301 Redirects, and a whole pile of other things related to Urls.

- you don't need to know regex in order to setup 301 redirects in Url Master

- it can help you to migrate sites even if that site isn't already an ASP.NET site (ie, can work with .php, .html, .asp etc extensions)

- you don't need access to IIS (caveat : unless you need to change site extensions, in which case you'll need to map across the extension to asp.net, and you're on IIS6 - however, this is a 'once only' change, which your host can do for you)

- you can enter custom urls with Url Master, to match your old site urls.  Ie old site : /myoldpage.html .  With a Url like this, you can elect to either give your equivalent DNN page the same url, or you can redirect the /myoldpage.html to /mynewpage.aspx (or /mynewpage )  Again, no need to know regex, you just type the new url into a box and click 'update'.

- while the Url Master by default creates the url the same as the page name, there are built-in options to change that (ie, replacing spaces and non-ascii characters) as well as to give the page a whole new name altogether.

 - you should not lose any ranking if you change page name.  In some cases, you can actually increase your ranking by giving a page a new Url.  Generally you would do this when you can change the Url of the page to better match your intended keywords.  E.g. - from /myoldpage.html to /my-new-page-with-a-keyword.aspx.    Don't be too afraid to use 301 redirects, generally they go very smoothly and the new urls are published within days.  In some cases you might take a temporary drop in rankings until the next update, in which you should be back as strong as ever.  I've migrated a lot of pages/sites with 301 redirects and haven't yet had a bad result.  Of course, if your existing page name is already optimised, then keep it as is.

-with regards to indexability, take care to use a simple DNN Menu system (I use Snapsis CSS menu) and to also try and get a simple, CSS based skin without too many inline styles, tables, and nesting.

I'm happy to answer any more queries you have, probably best to ask via http://www.ifinity.com.au/Products/Support_Forums, as I don't always get to check the DNN forums.  Or you can reply here and I'll try and catch it.

Bruce, thanks for the clarification.  I figured Regex wouldn't be needed if one can input the desired new page name.  Anyway, I read about Regex and it's not difficult.

I made the comment about accessing IIS thinking about a way of doing the redirection directly on IIS without using additional 3rd party modules. :-)

The topic of 301 redirects brought to my attention something that I hadn't thought of, really.  I hadn't thought about existing links or bookmarks out there that would point to unexisting pages, and that would defintiely be a problem.  I was more concerned about the new DNN page names and URL not being "optimized" and affecting ranking.

My site is pretty simple and I use the basic DNN menu only one level deep.  I have pages that are reached from within pages and are not on the main menu, but  I expect the crawlers to index those and I would incoude them in a sitemap.

I'll revisit your site if I need more info.

Thanks.

I was going to start a new thread, but this seemed like an apt home.

I've got a site that is migrating from a structure that used query-based urls ( e.g.  http://www.example.com/abc/console.do?page=r_sales ). I've done a fair amount of googling and haven't come up with any great solutions. I've also checked with several module developers on Snowcovered and it seems this is on the 'to do' list for several (we attempt to only consider modules / developers that offer enterprise/server licensing due to cost and license tracking for our projects and hosted domains).  Has anyone else encountered this and which solution did you wind up using?

I've also read over the years that one should attempt to keep a 1:1 redirect ratio, but the site has been trimmed down significantly leaving me with a lot of orphaned links. I'm guessing I should just implement a Custom 404 page for these?  I would *assume* that the orphaned pages would take the ranking hit, but I'd like to be sure before I commit the change.

Of course, I will be submitting the sitemap too Google, implementing a Robots.txt file, and ideally implementing some form of 301 Redirect even if I have to do it manually in IIS, I'm just hoping there may be some suggestions that I'm not seeing.

Thanks!
-Wells

PS - not sure I agree with the above comment about not using the core DNN Menu, I've been very pleased with the new DNNNav 2.0 control. I have had less trouble getting it to render compliant, crawlable code than I ever had with SolPartMenu and DNNNav 1.x. I know many people choose to go with 3rd party pure CSS menus, however I have found the new webcontrols to be a great step forward.