Page Comparison

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When XperienCentral's SEO component is installed, theoretically all URLs for your website are friendly. The friendly URL for pages is constructed using the page's location in the navigation tree together with the URL title, navigation title, or page title (depending on how SEO is configured). For example, if a page has the title '"XperienCentral'", then the URL of the page will be .../XperienCentralxperiencentral.htm (or .html). With SEO disabled, the URL of a page is not created using the pages's friendly URL title, instead an internal ID as assigned to pages within XperienCentral is used, for example .../id=77581/langid=42. For search engines and users, the unfriendly URL provides no useful meaning regarding the contents of the page and/or its location in the website's navigation hierarchy.

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In addition to the friendly URL, a content item can also be navigated to from a second friendly URL that omits the friendly URL separator. For example, if the friendly URL separator is a dash (-) and the friendly URL for a page is

gx-products.htm

then the above page is also available at the friendly URL

gxproducts.htm

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Page Title Uniqueness

In XperienCentral it is not required that all web pages have a unique title. Because the friendly URL is determined based on the title of a page plus its location in the navigation structure, two or more pages can have the same title and not have friendly URL conflicts. For example:

In the example above, the "Contact" pages all have the page title "Contact" but because of their relative locations in the site structure, the friendly URLs for the pages remain unique. Given the fact that the friendly URL is determined by a page's title (URL, navigation, page), the following situation in which three pages in the same tree have the same page title also does not lead to friendly URL conflicts:

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Content Item Title Uniqueness

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This is because content items can be displayed on any page and therefore XperienCentral has no way of determining at the time that a content item is created where it will be displayed and therefore what its full friendly URL will be. XperienCentral only compares the friendly URL of newly created content items to last part of all existing friendly URLs '.htm'. For example, creating a content item that resolves to the friendly URL 'Contact.htm' would lead to a friendly URL conflict with all the pages in the following table:

In XperienCentral, when two pages/items attempt to resolve to the same friendly URL, the conflict is resolved automatically. The mechanism for resolving friendly URLs is fully described in How Friendly URLs are Constructed.

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Friendly URL Claiming

In XperienCentral, it is possible for two or more pages/items to resolve to the same friendly URL as a result of your website's structure. This can occur, for example, when through a combination of URL titles, navigation titles, and/or item titles, the calculated friendly URL for two or more pages/items turns out to be identical. Naturally, only one item can claim a specific unique friendly URL if this occurs. All other items that try to claim a friendly URL that is already claimed (in use) will be automatically assigned a different friendly URL in order to resolve the conflict.

XperienCentral determines which item claims a friendly URL in a straightforward manner: The item that was created first claims the friendly URL it wants — All other items that try to claim that friendly URL are assigned a different, unique URL based on the name of the original. For items that attempt to use a claimed URL, a dash (-) plus a number is appended to the end of the original friendly URL and that is used in the address for the item. The number increments by one for each successive item that wants to claim the original friendly URL in the order they are created. The following simple example assumes that the pages are assigned no URL or navigation title but share the same page title in the same tree structure:

As you can see above, if you create a page named "Contact" and then later another with the same name in the same tree structure, the second page will be assigned the friendly URL "Contact-1.htm", the third "Contact-2.htm", and so forth.

The example above shows how page titles that attempt to claim the same URL are resolved. It is also possible to have URL conflicts that are the result of more complicated circumstances, such as URL titles and/or navigation titles that conflict with a page or object title or navigation titles that conflict with each other, content item titles that conflict with a page's friendly URL, and so forth. The following table shows what the URL result would be for conflicts at a variety of title and navigation title levels.

Friendly URL Conflict Indicator

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• Accept the friendly URL as assigned by XperienCentral.
• Rename the title (URL, navigation, page) of the current page/content item that is attempting to use the claimed friendly URL to a desired, unclaimed friendly URL.
• If the title of the page or content item itself conflicts with a claimed friendly URL but you nevertheless want to continue using it, add an unused navigation or URL title that does not produce a friendly URL conflict. For page title conflicts, you can also make use of an alternate URL path to avoid the conflict. Alternate URL paths are described in detail in Using Alternate URL Paths.
• Release the URL from the page/content item that is claiming it so that it can be used by the current page/content item. See Releasing Claimed Friendly URLs for complete information.

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Maintaining Friendly URLs

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In the overview, the column headings have the following meanings:

Maintaining Items With More Than One Friendly URL

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