Page Comparison

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HTML Titles and Friendly URLs

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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 .../xperiencentral.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.

How Friendly URLs are Constructed

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1. URL title. If there is a URL title assigned to a page or item, it takes precedence and is always used in the friendly URL. To the URL title, the path and friendly URL extension, prefix, and separator will be added.
2. Navigation title (pages only). If a page has no URL title assigned to it, the navigation title is used in the friendly URL. To the navigation title, the path and the friendly URL extension, prefix and separator will be added.
3. Item title. If the page/content item has no URL title or navigation title assigned to it, the title of the item itself is used in the friendly URL. To the title, the path and the friendly URL extension, prefix and separator will be added. Note: If a page has no navigation title, the title of the page is also used as the navigation title in the navigation tree of the website.

The table below shows what the URL for items in a tree structure would be for some sample pages. The values in the following examples assume the following:

• The URL's extension is set to .htm.
• The separator symbol, which is substituted for spaces that appear in titles, is a dash (-). The separator symbol is defined in the XperienCentral Setup Tool. The default is a dash (-).

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For Content Repository items, the situation is a bit different. Because Content Repository items do not have navigation titles, only the URL title or the title of the item itself is used in the friendly URL. If a content item has a URL title, it is used in the friendly URL, otherwise the title of the content item itself is used. The exact friendly URL that a content item will have when it is viewed depends on the page on which it is displayed.

For example, if a content item has the title "GX releases XperienCentral 10", the friendly URL of the content item is 'GX-releases-XperienCentral-10.htm'. There is no hierarchical structure prefixed internally to the friendly URL of the content item because it is stored in the Content Repository. When the content item is displayed on a page, the hierarchical structure of the 'display on' page is prefixed to the content item's friendly URL with the result being the friendly URL for the page and the content item. Based on the example friendly URLs shown in the table above, the friendly URLs for the following sample content items would be:

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Google News ID for Articles

If the Google News id has been enabled in XperienCentral, the friendly URL of content items is generated in a slightly different manner. A unique id (number) is prefixed to the part of the friendly URL just before the title of the article, for example,.../02041/GX-releases-XperienCentral-version-10,htm. This is done in order to satisfy a requirement of the Google News article aggregation service.

Uppercase and Lowercase Letters in Friendly URLs

XperienCentral does not distinguish between uppercase and lowercase letters when resolving URLs. That is, the URLs http://www.gxsoftware.com/Welcome.htm and http://www.gxsoftware.com/welcome.htm resolve to the same address. While friendly URLs in XperienCentral can be a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters as displayed in the address bar of a browser, all versions of an address using a mixture of cases are the same.

Second Friendly URL

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Page Title Uniqueness

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Content Item Title Uniqueness

In XperienCentral, content items must have a unique friendly URL title compared to the following:

• All titles used in the friendly URL of all other content items in the Content Repository (URL title/ content item title)
• All titles that are currently used in the friendly URL of a page (URL title, navigation title, page title)
• All titles that are currently used in the friendly URL of all pages in all web initiatives where the content item can appear
• All friendly URLs assigned to external (database) objects

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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.

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Friendly URL Conflict Indicator

When you create a new page or content item, XperienCentral assigns a friendly URL to it based on the rules explained in the previous sections. For each new page/content item you create, a check is made to see whether the requested friendly URL is available. If the friendly URL that the page/content item wants is available, it is granted. If, however, the friendly URL is already in use, a message will appear above the page/content item indicating that the desired friendly URL is already in use and that a new friendly URL has been assigned to the current page/item. For example, the friendly URL title 'Contact' is already claimed by another page or content item. When the page below entitled "Contact" is created, an indicator that the friendly URL is already claimed displays above the page

In the example above, the message that displays is: "URL is set to 'Contact-1.htm'. Contact already uses URL 'Contact.htm'" In this case, because the friendly URL 'Contact.htm' is already claimed, the current page is automatically assigned the URL 'Contact-1' to ensure that all friendly URLs remain unique. The above action is performed on all XperienCentral pages and content items that attempt to use a friendly URL that is already claimed. To link to the page/content item that is claiming the friendly URL that the current page/content item wants, click the name of the item that is claiming the friendly URL that you want to use in the indicator ('Contact' in the example above).

When the friendly URL you want to use for an item is already claimed, you have the following options:

• 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

The XperienCentral SEO component maintains a comprehensive overview of all your website's URLs. From a central location you can generate various reports for the friendly URLs currently in use on your website. This makes it possible to easily manage your website's friendly URLs and also to ensure that pages and content items have the friendly URL that you want them to have. The SEO component can generate the following friendly URL overviews:

• Overview of all friendly URLs (.exported CSV file)
• All items with more than one friendly URL
• All items without friendly a URL
• Items that want the same friendly URL

Generating an Overview of All Friendly URLs

The SEO component allows you to generate a comprehensive list of all friendly URLs on your website. The overview is exported in the form of a file containing comma separated values (CSV) that you can open in another application, such as Microsoft Excel, in order to view and search through the list. Follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Configuration > SEO.
2. On the [Overview] tab, select "All friendly URLs" from the drop-down list.
3. Click [Download overview].
4. A standard Open/Save dialog box will open in the browser. Click [Open] or [Save][Open], the exported file will open in the application associated with .csv files. If you click [Save], you can specify the name of the file (export.csv by default) and the location where you want to save it.

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• Pages - &id=43137&langid=42
• Media Repository articles - &contentid=3
• External objects - &dbid=12901&typeofpage=40054

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Maintaining Items With More Than One Friendly URL

As a result of many factors, it is possible that a page or item can have a claim on more than one friendly URL. This can occur if the URL, navigation or page title of a page or content item is changed or renamed or if a page is moved from one location to another in the navigation structure. Whenever a page or content item is saved, a friendly URL for it is calculated — if any changes occur to the friendly URL of a page or content item, it receives a new friendly URL based on the current circumstances and also keeps the previous URL(s) it once had which now act as redirects. This is explained in more detail in Maintaining the URL History of Pages and Content Items.

To generate a list of all items that are claiming more than one friendly URL, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Configuration > SEO.
2. On the [Overview] tab, select "All items with more than one friendly URL" from the drop-down list. The list is generated. Each item with more than one friendly URL is shown against a light gray background with its currently active friendly URL. Each of the other friendly URLs being claimed by the item is listed below it. In the middle column the item sort is indicated (page, content item, or database object) along with its ID.
3. If you want to release one or more friendly URLs that an item is claiming to make it available again on your website, select "Delete" next to the URL(s).
4. Click [Apply]. The friendly URLs will be released and can now be used by other items on your website. This task can also be performed on individual content items and pages. For more information, see Deleting URLs from a Page or Content Item's URL History.

Maintaining Items That Want to Claim the Same Friendly URL

When a content item or page is created that attempts to use a claimed friendly URL, it is assigned a unique URL based on the title of the URL it wants as described in Friendly URL Claiming. To see the items on your website attempting to claim a friendly URL that is already in use, follow these steps:

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Availability of the Friendly URL Indicator

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Maintaining Items with No Friendly URL

In theory, all items in XperienCentral have friendly URLs. If, however, items don't have a friendly URL, you can easily add friendly URLs to them. To see the items that have no friendly URL, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Configuration > SEO.
2. On the [Overview] tab, select "All pages without friendly URLs". The items without a friendly URL are listed. If any items appear in the list, you can manually recalculate the friendly URL for some or all items on your website.
3. Click the [Friendly URLs] tab.
4. Select the type of recalculation to be performed:
• Calculate the friendly URL for all items which have no friendly URL yet. A friendly URL will be assigned only to the selected items currently lacking a friendly URL.
• Recalculate the friendly URL for all items. A friendly URL will be calculated for all the selected items belonging to the current web initiative. Note: The URL history for pages and content items will be preserved.
5. Select the items for which the friendly URL calculation will be performed: "Pages" or "Content Repository items".
6. Click [Calculate]. Items with no friendly URL will be assigned one.

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For web pages and articles, the last part of a friendly URL, the title of the page/article itself, is used as the title in the title bar of the browser to identify the page/article. This title also appears in the Windows task bar when the browser is minimized. For pages/articles that are trying to claim an active friendly URL, the same title is used in the title bar, not the friendly URL that is assigned to it by XperienCentral. For example, if the friendly URL 'Contact.htm' is claimed by a page/article, in the title bar of the browser the title 'Contact' is used. However, if another page/article is assigned the friendly URL Contact-1.htm', the title of 'Contact-1.htm' in the browser will also be 'Contact'.

Explicitly Setting the HTML Title

By default, XperienCentral uses the title of pages/articles in the <title> HTML tag. If you want to override the default title, you can do so by adding a different HTML title that will be used for the page/article. To override the HTML title of a page/article, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the page/article whose HTML title you want to override.
2. Open the Actions > Properties > Meta keywords menu.
3. In the "HTML title" box, enter the text that you want to display in the title bar of the browser for the page/article.

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Using Alternate URL Paths

For web pages, you can specify an alternate URL path that is used in the active friendly URL. This allows you to reference the web page via a path that does not necessarily exist in your website's navigation structure. Just as the friendly URL for a page is constructed using the relative path (based on the navigation tree) plus the title of the page, the friendly URL of a page with an alternate URL path is constructed using the alternate URL path plus the title of the page. The alternate URL path begins after the '/web' part of the friendly URL.

To assign an alternate URL path to a web page, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the page in the Site Structure Widget.
2. Click the Actions icon.
3. Click the [SEO] tab.
4. In the "Alternate URL Path" text box, enter the URL to use in the friendly URL for the page. The URL path must begin with a forward slash (/) and use a forward slash to separate each level.
5. Click [Apply] and then [Close].

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URL Title Standardization

A limited set of characters is allowed in a URL. When you create a new item, its friendly URL title is standardized, meaning that the text entered for the title is simplified if it contains illegal characters in order to ensure that the URL is valid. When standardizing a URL, XperienCentral applies the following rules:

• Converts all special characters containing diacriticals marks (for example, é and ë) to the version of the letter without diacritical marks.
• Deletes all other extended characters other than uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, underscores, and periods.

This process ensures that the URL titles of items are valid and are able to be resolved by web browsers. As a result of standardizing, it is possible for items to have conflicting friendly URL titles even if the titles as they appear in XperienCentral are clearly different. In this case, the friendly URL conflict is resolved as described in the section How Friendly URLs are Constructed.

The following are examples of friendly URL conflicts as a result of URL standardizing.

For a complete list of character mapping conversions that result from URL standardization, see Special Character Conversion Table.

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Maintaining the URL History of Pages and Media Items

The friendly URL of pages and content items is based on its designated title (URL title, navigation title, or the title of the page or content item). When an item is first created, it is assigned a friendly URL, also known as the active friendly URL. If a page is moved or renamed, the active friendly URL also changes, however, the previously active friendly URL is still claimed by the item.

For example, on September 1, 2012, a page with the title "XperienCentral" is created under the home page. This page is available at the friendly URL "/GX-XperienCentral.htm". On September 8, 2012, the page title is changed to "Products", which makes the page also available at the URL "/Products.htm" (which is now the active URL). As a result, from September 8, 2012, the page can be accessed through two URLs: "GX-XperienCentral.htm" and "Products.htm". In this case, because the active URL for the page is now "Products.htm", any links to "GX-XperienCentral.htm" are automatically redirected to "Products.htm". The advantage of this system is that the old URL ("/GX-XperienCentral.htm") remains available so that references from links to the previous name of the page still work.

A URL that was at any time assigned to a page or content item remains tied to it and the item still has the claim on that friendly URL which means that other items cannot use it because it is still in use (as a redirect). In XperienCentral you can view and manage the URL history of pages and content items. This makes it possible to see which friendly URLs are being claimed by a page/content item and also to release claimed URLs that you want reuse elsewhere. To view the URL history of a page or content item, follow these steps:

1. Click a page in the navigation tree to select it or select the content item in the Content Repository.
2. Select "Edit Properties" from the Actions menu.
3. Click the [SEO] tab.

Deleting URLs from a Page or Media Item's URL History

If you want to use a URL that another page or content item has a claim to but is not actively using, you have to delete the URL from the 'also available at' list for the page or content item claiming the desired URL in order to release it. Note: The following operation can also be performed from the Configuration > SEO menu item. See Maintaining Items With More Than One Friendly URL for more information.

Follow these steps:

1. Click the box next to "Delete" to select the URL(s) that you want to release,
2. Click [Apply]. The friendly URL is deleted (released).
3. Click [Close]. You can now use the friendly URL for another page or content item.

Releasing Claimed Friendly URLs

If you want to release the friendly URL from a page or content item that is currently claiming it in order to use it elsewhere, the approach depends on whether the page or content item is actively using the friendly URL or whether the URL is claimed by the page or content item in its URL history.

There are two ways to release the claimed friendly URL from a page or content item in order to use it elsewhere. You can either delete the page/content item completely, which immediately frees up the friendly URL, or you can rename the page or content item claiming the active URL and then remove the friendly URL from the URL history of the renamed page. Follow these steps:

Deleting the page or content item

1. For a page, right-click it in the navigation tree and select "Delete".
2. For a content item, select it in the list of items in the Content Repository and click [Delete]. The friendly URL of the deleted page or content item is now available (has been released).

Renaming the page or content item

1. Navigate to the page in the navigation tree or to the content item in the Content Repository whose active friendly URL you want to release.
2. Rename the title (URL, navigation or page) that is responsible for the claim on the friendly URL to something else.
3. Navigate to File > Properties > URL titles.
4. Follow the steps for deleting claimed friendly URLs as described in the section Deleting a URL From a Page or Media Item's URL History. The friendly URL is now released and can be used by another page or content item.

Releasing a page or content item's claim on a URL

Pages and content items can claim more than one friendly URL, however, only one of them is active at one time. The non-active URLs act as redirects to the active friendly URL. If you want to release the non-active URLs of a page or content item to use elsewhere, follow the steps below.

1. Navigate to the page in the navigation tree or to the content item in the Content Repository whose active friendly URL you want to release.
2. Click the Actions button and select "Edit Properties".
3. Click the [SEO] tab.
4. Follow the steps for deleting claimed friendly URLs as described in Deleting a URL From a Page or Content Item's URL History. The friendly URL is now released and can be used by another page or content item.

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