SEO and multiple URLs

(Evan Wills) #1

In a number of places on our website, we have multiple URLs applied e.g.


  • http://www.uni.edu.au/courses/ and
    [*]https://www.uni.edu.au/courses/ and
    [*]http://www.uni.edu.au/courses_2013/

We would like to make the first URL (as listed in asset > web paths > Current URLs) the primary URL, preferably by having the other URLs return HTTP 301 headers and sending the user to the correct location. Or by placing <link href="http://www.uni.edu.au/courses/" rel="canonical" /> in the HTML <head> area.

I've looked through the matrix key words and done some basic testing the %asset_url% keyword won't do the job because it only seems to print the current URL being used.

Currently matrix only seems to supports 404 and 301 pages set at site root level and thus applied site wide. Is it possible with Matrix to control the HTTP headers at the design level (so we can create custom 404 and 301 pages for various parts of the site)?
Is it possible to target and print the first URL listed in the "current URLs" list?
(Agordon86) #2

Hi Evan,


This may not be much help to you, but I can share that in our environment we create the page with the content, giving it only one web path (e.g. www.website.com/about-us/contact-us) then we create a 'redirect page' object for each alternative URL, for example www.website.com/contact-us.



If a visitor (or search engine bot) attempts to use the alternative URL they are immediately redirected to the correct content page.



I believe this method may be more suitable for your needs.



It of course means you're left with many 'redirect page' objects at the root level of your website - which is good when you need to look up the short URL.

(Evan Wills) #3

Hi ovann86


Ordinarily that would work. However in this case we've got the metadata from the pages being used by another part of the site. So we can't delete the pages or archive them. Also there are heaps of links to the pages else where on the site so if we delete them and create new redirect pages we'd break all the links point to the deleted asset IDs. What I want, ideally, is to create a design that modifies the HTTP headers so that I can apply that in one section of the site without having to change the status of the pages.