The Url Master module contains advanced 404 Error Handling features. It's important for both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and website usability to have a solid 404 Error Handling strategy for your website. It's important for site visitors, so that any visitors that follow or enter an invalid Url are not lost from the site, and can be directed back to valid pages on the site. It's important for SEO because website administrators do not want invalid Urls indexed as part of the site, and search engines need to know what is valid content and what is not. It's standard practice on the world wide web to show a 'Page Not Found' page of content when an invalid Url is requested by a visitor.
The problem with a standard DotNetNuke installation is that you can't easily specify a page in the site to display a 'Page Not Found' error. Some administrators of DotNetNuke websites work around this problem by manually configuring a 'page not found' page through the low-level settings in the web.config file of their site - which may solve the problem for redirecting visitors to correct pages of the site, but then fails the problem of properly notifying Search Engines that the page is not valid. This is because handling the errors through the web.config file results in a 302 redirect to the 'Page not Found' page. This is the incorrect result to send back to search engines, because they follow the redirect and don't know that the Url originally followed was actually incorrect. The problem is further expanded with Google now guessing which pages in a website are error pages. They can guess incorrectly if you do not specify the actual error pages, and this can result in valid content being removed from the Google search results. And the last problem with this approach is that it's very difficult to brand the page correctly if you have multiple portals running in the one DotNetNuke install.
The Url Master module fixes these problems by allowing administrators to select a '404 page' from their site to show for 404 errors. You just create a new page in your DotNetNuke site, add some content to show visitors where they might look for a result, and then, through the Url Master module interface, specify that page as the '404 Error Handling' page. You can do this for each separate portal in your site, creating true multi-portal 404 error handling in DotNetNuke. Not only does it work for visitors, but search engines also receive the correct '404' status code, so there's no guessing if a page is valid or not : the search engine reading your site knows straight away when an invalid page is found. Up until now, this was virtually impossible, but the Url Master module allows you to do it in a couple of clicks through your Administrator login!
Advanced 404 Settings
For those administrators who need even more control over their 404 handling, the Url Master module gives a further two options : a custom Url for an error page within the site, or a mixture of both a selected DotNetNuke page and a customised error page, with the ability to define a regex-based filter to decide which to use. This gives Administrators with a need for greater flexibility the option to use custom code for specific 'page not found' purposes, and yet still keep a generic 'page not found' setting for ordinary invalid Urls. With this power and flexibility, there is no 404 scenario that cannot be handled by the Url Master module.
See it in action!
This website is configured to use a custom 404 page. You can see it by following this invalid link.
404 Error Log
Any administrator needs to watch what invalid Urls are being requested. This is so that they can take action if there is a frequently followed link that is incorrect, and the visitors are all ending up on the 'page not found' page. While the raw server logs are available to view this information, this requires access to this information. Web analytics packages like Google Analytics do not track page not found errors, because they rely on a valid page load to record the results. The Url Master module comes with a per-portal 404 error log, so administrators can view and track the list of Urls which have been requested as invalid. This allows administrators to take action and setup a redirect on frequently-requested invalid Urls.