Friday Sitecore Best Practice: Using Sitecore Aliases
Vasiliy Fomichev
In Best Practices, Content Posted May 13, 2016
In this episode we take a look at how we can create short URLs with Sitecore aliases, as well as point out a couple of things to be careful about.
David Rossall
November 14, 2016 at 8:08 amThis summarises the limitations of Sitecore aliases quite well, but doesn’t really explain why they work the way they do and what might be done about it, other than to recommend using redirects instead (quite rightly). The Google ranking and cross-site duplication issues are quite significant. I can’t really see any balancing advantages of the somewhat unique Sitecore approach to aliases/redirects.
JenKove
May 16, 2016 at 10:34 amInteresting take on it. I hadn’t considered the google ranking/duplicate issue. Thank you!
This makes me think of things that it may be useful to remind people when using alias and Redirect Manager in the same post:
While Redirect Manager can act as an alias in that you can take a long string and redirect it to a node, you can’t redirect something to more than domain/alias. You can’t redirect http://www.oldsite.com/aboutoldsite/overview to http://www.newsite.org/about/overview with an alias. That is only done with Redirect Manager.
You could use an alias called overview for newsite: http://www.newsite.org/overview could bring up content at http://www.newsite.org/about/overview
One more tip: You don’t HAVE to navigate to System > aliases if your intent is to link to an item in the tree. I’d do that only if linking to an external URL or something else like an anchor. If you are linking to something in the tree, while on the item in the tree, you can click the Presentation tab and select and create an Alias there. When publishing, be sure to include all related items so that the new Alias now appearing in the system > alias area, will publish.
Arjunan Selvam
May 13, 2016 at 6:16 pmThis video is quite useful & thanks for sharing. Keep posting 🙂