Home, Default and Root.

If you have questions about using mojoPortal, you can post them here.

You may want to first review our site administration documentation to see if your question is answered there.

This thread is closed to new posts. You must sign in to post in the forums.
5/31/2009 11:06:25 AM
Gravatar
Total Posts 12

Home, Default and Root.

I have an issue which may be having an effect on SEO and i'm trying to work out how to fix it.

For Google I create links to my site so that other peoples websites link to "http://www.mysite.com". When they click though they arrive at the site ok. Now if they click the site logo they go to "http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx" which is the same page. If they click 'home' from the default menu they go to "http://www.mysite.com/home.aspx" which again is exactly the same page. The problem is Google is seeing 3 pages but they are infact the same page.

The way to fix this I think would be to get the logo to link to "http://www.mysite.com" and the Home link to "http://www.sitemap.com". There should be no internal links whatsoever to http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx

How can i make this happen?

 

Simon

5/31/2009 11:32:13 AM
Gravatar
Total Posts 18439

Re: Home, Default and Root.

Hi Simon,

Google does not have a problem with 3 urls in this case because if you view the source, we have added a connonical link which tells google the true page url. If you view this site for example using http://www.mojoportal.com or http:/www.mojoportal.com/Default.aspx or http://www.mojoportal.com/home.aspx , if you view the source ofthe rendered page, in all 3 cases, you will see in the header this:

<link rel='canonical' href='http://www.mojoportal.com/home.aspx' />

this clears up any confusion about multiple urls, google will see all 3 as the same page and in search results the canonical url will be shown.

Default.aspx is the actual handler for all 3 of those urls and all page listed in the menu. Since Default.aspx is configured as the default document in IIS, a request for http://www.mojoportal.com is the same as if the user entered http://www.mojoportal.com/Default.aspx

It will resolve to the first page in your site hierarchy which in many cases will be home.aspx but it could be anything, you can move any page to the root of your site and the root requests will resolve to that page. But the page has a name and an url, in this case on this site that page is named Home and has the url home.aspx which is the official url for the page

Similarly but differently, in the forums we have urls like:
http://www.mojoportal.com/Forums/Thread.aspx?thread=3046&mid=34&pageid=5&ItemID=5&pagenumber=1

a user may enter those params in a different sequence or someone may link to it with those params in different sequence, but we have a caninical url in the page which clears up any ambiguity by always having the params in the same order regarldess of how they may appear in the actual url. So if you view the source of the page you see this:
<link rel='canonical' href='http://www.mojoportal.com/Forums/Thread.aspx?pageid=5&amp;mid=34&amp;ItemID=5&amp;thread=3046&amp;pagenumber=1' />

Hope it helps,

Joe

6/2/2009 1:19:41 PM
Gravatar
Total Posts 12

Re: Home, Default and Root.

Yes that makes sense however when google indexes the site it is storing http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx as the main page for the site when really it should be http://www.mysite.com

This may only seem like an asthetic issue but I think it's quite important.

In my mind because default.aspx is the default page it should never have to be linked to internally or externally. In order to set about removing references I have used the full url 'http://www.mysite.co.uk' for the pagelink of the home page in site setting swhich has fixed the issue in the menu structure and site map and just leaves me with the logo which is still linking to default.aspx. Is there a way to change this?

 

6/3/2009 4:46:53 AM
Gravatar
Total Posts 18439

Re: Home, Default and Root.

Yes, you can take complete control of that, the SiteTitle and or SiteLogo controls in the layout.master file of your skin are just a convenience, you can remove them and enter markup as you would like it. What I would do is view the rendered source of your page and grab the markup for the title/logo and paste it directly into your layout.master in place of those controls. Then you can edit any of it as you see fit including changing the url format of links.

Hope ithelps,

Joe 

You must sign in to post in the forums. This thread is closed to new posts.