Multi-lingual sites have specific requirements on how page URL need to be handled. Between the versions 3 and 5, Kentico made some adjustments to give site editor a better control over page URLs. And with a little extra work you can score some points with Google.
Automatic URL creation
The first thing you need to know is that Kentico automatically creates the page URL — based on the name you give your document — automatically. The URL is composed of three parts: Besides the domain name, the path where your document was created, called the alias path and the document alias name, which is as mentioned based on your document name. The only difference between you document name and your alias name is that an alias name cannot contain any white spaces or special characters, such as a question mark or an apostrophe. These characters will be replaced with a simple hyphen.
It is also important to note that after you have saved the document and make changes to the name of your document, the alias name is not automatically updated. This is a good thing, because you might have already created a link from another page to your document.
URL handling for multi-lingual sites
As a default setting, pages that exist in multiple languages (also called cultures) have the same URL. A user that would access this URL the first time would see the document in its default culture and after that in the culture the user left the site during its last visit. This behaviour is made possible with the use of cookies.
I criticised Kentico a couple of month ago that this decision is wrong, because search engine spiders do not accept cookies and it is not possible to create a link to a specific culture of a site.
Kentico reacted quickly to this criticism and already with version 4.1 the document URL path was introduced.
The URL document path
The URL document path is created automatically as well, but it is unique for each culture.
In my example the name of my page is called:
“Inside Kentico: Using the Document URL Path”
The document alias was created automatically and all white spaces have been replaced with hyphens, what makes the URL accessible for search engines (In many search engines, words in URLs count as keywords). I only had to manually delete the additional hyphen the double point caused. But this is more cosmetic fine-tuning, than indispensable.
The document URL path was also created automatically, but it also includes the path to my page, which is stored in my blog, filed in the month of February 2010. Here I also made the same aesthetic change and removed the double hyphen. You can change the URL path by checking “Use custom URL path”.
Now, the part where this becomes important is if your document is published in two cultures. In my case, if I would create the same page in French, it would look like this:
The custom URL path was created automatically again, but is unique. Kentico solves this by adding “-1” to the end of your document path. Honestly, I don’t find this very elegant, but Kentico is already looking for a better solution. I would wish that the culture specific extension added could be user defined and could either be added to the end of the document or in the beginning of the path. You can however enter any other URL path here as well, to make the address distinct and easy to read.
The result
The result is simple: You have now created two unique pages with two unique URLs. The URL defined on the French site brings you to the French page and of course the same is true for the English URL. This feature allows you to send your users to the culture you want and search engine spiders can pick up all cultures.
Moving pages
You should be aware that if you move your document in your site, the URL path remains the same. Again, I would wish here that the path would get updated as well. Let’s see what version 5.5 will bring.
Good news however is that if you manually change your document path, the system automatically keeps the old link active and creates an alias to the page unless you decide to remove it. This feature avoids broken page links.
In version 5.0 it is possible to define these aliases as permanent redirects, simply because Google prefers to keep only one unique URL per page to avoid duplicate content.
Site settings
If you are the administrator of your site, you can decide how your site should behave, by adjusting your settings in the section URL settings.
