Removing /dotnetnuke/ in all page urls

Question

We want to remove the /dotnetnuke/ from all 300 pages of our website that has been running since Feb 09.

Google isn't indexing all of our pages just 98. I'm thinking that the /dotnetnuke/ is causing our content to be too deep in our site for Google to find(?)

We also don't have any Page Rank although our site appears on page one for most search queries. Obviously we don't want to lose our position in Google.

Would you advise that we do remove the /dotnetnuke/ in our urls and if so should we create a new site and use 301 redirects or is there a way of removing the /dotnetnuke/ from our existing urls but still keeping our Google history?

Many thanks

Answer 1

DotNetNuke uses its own URL rewriting which is built in to the framework. DotNetNuke uses the provider model, so you can also plug in your own URL rewriter or secure one from a third party. If that is what you need, I'd suggest taking a look at Bruce Chapman's iFinity URL Rewriter as a quality free third party extension to DotNetNuke. He also offers a fancier commercial version called URL Master, which I haven't needed to use as of yet.

However, I believe the /dotnetnuke/ you're referring too may not actually be part of your "pages," but the actual alias of your DotNetNuke portal (i.e. www.yoursite.com/dotnetnuke). This would mean that /dotnetnuke/ is part of your base path for all pages because using the base path as an identifier is how DotNetNuke determines that you want to load a particular portal. If this is the case, you could potentially just change your portal alias to be www.yoursite.com (depending on the level of access you have to the site/server).

Lastly, sometimes virtual pages do not get included in DotNetNuke's site map. If you are using a third party module for your dynamic content - it may in fact not be represented on your site map. I'd look in to what pages are currently represented on your site map as well.

Answer 2

In IIS7 you can use URL rewrite functionality to hide /dotnetnuke/.

301 redirect will also work fine (just make sure you are not using 302 - Google doesn't like it)

Answer 3

Another answer in adition to the first 2 is that you are running DNN on GoDaddy hosting. Godaddy has a strange way of setting up sites here is how you can remove that problem

Set up a second (non primary) domain. Under domain management, you can actually assign the second domain to point to a subdirectory. Make sure that the subdirectory is whatever you set dnn to

Might have this wrong as i got it off godaddys site but have done it twice and got it to work correctly