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How advanced URL provider works

Last updated on 2023-10-23 3 mins. to read

How you present your catalog URL is important for SEO and can help increase your sales. Your site can easily switch between different URL formatting providersWe recommend the Advanced URL provider because it provides the best SEO result and usability.

Normal URL

Consider the normal formatting for a product URL below when no URL formatting is applied. The normal URL format shows a query string parameter.

http://site.com/product?rvdsfpid=3

Search Friendly URL

When you enable the search-friendly provider, the URL format adds extra keywords for search engine indexing.

http://site.com/product?rvdsfpid=shoe-3

Human Friendly URL

When you enable human-friendly URL provider, the query string parameter may be rewritten as segments in the URL path. The challenge of rewriting a URL is to not lose any information and allow the friendly form to be converted back to its normal URL form, since that is the form expected by the Web server. 

http://site.com/product/rvdsfpid/shoe-3

Advanced URL

While the human-friendly URL is a respectable format optimized for search engines and computers, it still contains words that are undesirable to human. The Storefront includes an advanced URL provider that automatically rewrites your catalog URLs into shorter and friendlier form:

http://site.com/product/shoe

Unique keyword requirement

The challenge of rewriting the URL requires that all of the information can somehow be reversed back to its original normal URL form. You must, therefore, ensure your product keywords are unique.

By default, the keyword is chosen from your product name. If, however, a SEO URL name is provided, it will be used in place of the product name. If you have a collision in your product keywords, the rewriter will reverse the advanced URL to the first product found.

A good name should include the right amount of keywords to allow for optimal search indexing while keeping it short and meaningful for humans. For example, the keywords "genuine leather shoe" provides rich indexing information while keeping your product URL names sufficiently unique and short. Please see SEO for more information.

The advanced URL provider is not limited to products only. It also optimizes for categories, manufacturers, distributors, sellers and variants. Similarly, you want to make sure these catalog structures have unique names throughout your system.

http://site.com/products/apparels

http://site.com/product/apparels/shoe

http://site.com/product/apparels/shoe/brown

What happens to my old URL?

Your old URLs whether they are bookmarked or indexed by search engines will continue to function because the advanced URL provider is meant to be convertible between the two forms. 

Do I need to notify search engines?

It is not necessary since the Storefront will automatically generate canonical hints and sitemap to search engines such that over time, when the crawler bots revisit, they will start indexing and replacing your old URLs with the new ones.

What if I disable advanced URL provider?

Any short friendly URL generated by the advanced URL provider will not be recognized once disabled since there is no engine to rewrite back to the normal URL form. Fortunately, the Storefront automatically publishes sitemap of your products and search engines are usually quite fast to pick up URL changes after a few visits.

How do I verify for unique keywords?

You should have a business procedure for naming your products so that you and your staff is aware of the naming convention that minimizes conflicts to begin with. Once the procedure is in place, you only need to occasionally verify for correctness. The easiest way to visually inspect them is to export out the catalog data and glance through the keywords using Excel.

How to enable the advanced URL provider

By default, the advanced URL provider is enabled on new installations. If not, you can follow the steps below to enable it:

  1. Change the urlFormat attribute to "advanced" in your Web.config

    <add name="DNNFriendlyUrl" type="DotNetNuke.Services.Url.FriendlyUrl.DNNFriendlyUrlProvider, DotNetNuke.HttpModules" includePageName="true" regexMatch="a-zA-Z0-9 _-" urlFormat="advanced" />
     
  2. From the persona bar Settings > SEO, make sure the Revindex Storefront URL Extension Providers are enabled under the Extension URL Providers tab.

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