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3.9.4 Understanding the URL Manager

The URL Manager provides two core pieces of functionality

  1. It will automatically convert the messy URLs used by web applications into well-formatted search engine friendly URLs
  2. It provides Admins with the ability to manually specify URLs for their pages so that they can create more canonical URLs.

For example, in the first case, the URL to three specific pages on your site may be:

http://www.myserver.com/index.php?moduleId=H84BS72&pageId=38JSU1NS
http://www.myserver.com/index.php?moduleId=H84BS72&pageId=83JJ202M
http://www.myserver.com/index.php?moduleId=H84BS72&pageId=L02JWUBD

The conversion to a friendlier URL would turn them into

http://www.myserver.com/content/moduleId/H84BS72/pageId/38JSU1NS.html
http://www.myserver.com/content/moduleId/H84BS72/pageId/83JJ202M.html
http://www.myserver.com/content/moduleId/H84BS72/pageId/L02JWUBD.html

This is valuable because the new URLs are easier for a search engine to read than the original URLs, and they will be recognized by search engines as three unique pages, whereas in the first example, all three may be seen as simply "index.php".

Without this automatic translation, it is less likely that search engines will crawl your entire site.

Beyond this basic translation, however, the URL manager also enhances other modules by giving those modules the ability to mark content with custom URLs.

When editing pages, for example, an option labeled "Create a custom URL:" is provided below the editing area. In this area, you can complete the custom URL and give your page a URL something like one of the following:

http://www.myseerver.com/AboutUs.html
http://www.myseerver.com/Contact
http://www.myseerver.com/products/model468X.html

This allows you to create unique URLs that are very easy to read and understand, and are still very search engine friendly.