Arno de Beer wrote:
Hello,
I am new to DNN, so excuse me if this is a simple thing to solve...
Our company has a website where multiple solutions have the same product, for example:
/industry/product1
/healthcare/product1
Product1 is the same product, but because of the name of the solution in the URL, we have created a special page for it.
What I am looking for is something that there is 1 page for the product, product1. So what I need is 1 productpage, called product1. But if I go there from the solution /healthcare the url becomes /healthcare/product1. If I go from Industry, this same page needs to have the url /Industry/product1.
I hope I made my question clear enough. Can somebody help me with this? Thanks for the effort!!!
Hi Arno
What you're proposing is actually a bad idea if search engine results are important to you. Search Engines all rely on what they call 'canonical urls' which means each URL points to a unique piece of content. If you have two URLs pointing to the same page (as per your industry/product1 healthcare/product1 example) then search engines will detect that the two URLs point to the same page. This is then considered 'duplicate content'. Duplicate content doesn't rank well in search engines. The reason for this is that the URL carries some weight in the ranking algorithms (how much, we don't really know) - but if there were no penalty for having multiple URLs, then spam sites would create millions of different urls trying to rank pages for all sorts of keywords. Because of this possibility, you've got to have one URL - one unique piece of content, or you won't rank well.
If you need to locate the same page in your menu hierarchy, then you can create a DNN page for the second 'product 1' but change it to point to the other product 1 page - this is done in the page settings. The second page is really just a pointer to the first. In this case, the site will do a redirect to the first page, so you get to keep one URL and not have SEO problems, but have the benefit of multiple navigation options.
It's also possible to use a single page and put in a 'Canonical Link' element into the top of that page, which communicates to search engines to ignore all other URL/Content combinations for this page, and to concentrate on the URL that is in the Canonical Link. But DNN is really not designed to share pages across menu hierarchy so setting this up would get complicated, and I recommend my first approach.