Anyone?  Are you certain that your Sub-Portals are being indexed?  I'm asking, because of the DNN Alias system....suppose I have a life Main Portal called www.Main-Portal.com and now I sell a sub-portal to one of my customers that is www.sub-portal1.com This second portal has its own URL and is linked to the Main-Portal.  The DNS finds this second portal over DNN's Alias system. 

Can the search engines pick up this second portal (www.sub-portal1.com)? Or will they ignore it, since they spider the Main-Portal and leave out DNN particular way of re-directing things?

Please help.

Peter.

Peter,

  I think there is a general misunderstanding of how new pages are "found" by search engines.  It is not some secret.  There are two primary methods:  1) The website owner notifies the search engine of the existence of a page (usually through the submission of a collection of URLs that define a website) or 2)  The search engine finds a link to a site, and follows that link.  Once the search engine retrieves a page, it iterates over all of the links on that page and follows them to the "next" page.  The bottom line is that the search engines work off of links.  At their core a search indexer is a giant engine dedicated to finding distinct URLs on the web.  Each URL represents a specific resource.  So when you perform a search you are really asking for a list of resource URLs that are associated with the given words.  With this basic understanding in mind, as long as a search engine spider can find a link to the subportal, then it will be able to crawl the subportal.  The biggest obstacle to this has traditionally been the use of javascript to create links.  This typically has occured with menus.  However as more and more of the web is created with richer user interfaces, the search engines were forced to accomodate javascript and dynamic pages.  Some search engines are better than others when dealing with this type of link, however most of the top-tier search engines are more than capable of handling DotNetNuke sites.