Taking /Pages out of the SharePoint URL?

Question

A customer is asking if there is anything we can do to remove "/Pages" from his Internet-facing MOSS publishing site. Some Googling reveals that some clever use of HTTPModules may be able to hide the presence of Pages, but I've yet to see an end-to-end working solution. Have any of you come up against this particular requirement, and if so, how did you resolve it?

The customer's main concern with /Pages is the SEO impact of it - if anyone has any way to mitigate those issues or can explain why having this extra level in your URL would not be a concern, that would be appreciated as well (and probably better, in the long run!)

Answer 1

I know ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 has the URL routing engine that ASP.NET MVC uses built in. If you wanted to run against that version of the .NET framework, you could use routes to eliminate the /Pages part of the URL. But I'm not positive about running MOSS on that version of .NET. That's the first place I'd check, though.

Answer 2

You can get a list of public facing websites using MOSS here. You can see they use the "page" libraries and you can check your favorite search engines against the content. Hopefully this will be enough to demonstrate that the "Page" libraries aren't going to be too much of an issue and you can save them a bunch of cash.

Answer 3

Check out this posting. http://blog.mastykarz.nl/semantic-urls-in-moss-2007-imtech-sharepoint-semantic-urls-free-feature/

Answer 4

You can change the name (and the url) of the /Pages library.

Answer 5

The main issue you'll have is that Microsoft won't provide support for a SharePoint instance that has "hidden" the pages library.

Yes, you can use a URL re-writer to exclude the /pages section of the path, and you will also need to perform a search and replace on the response stream to strip it out of all generated URLS - this will obviously have a performance hit on the server - but with careful use of caching, it might not be that noticable.

PSS will require you to remove the setup before they will investigate any issues with your site, so you (or your client) will need to weigh up the perceived benefits with the performance and support issues.

I believe we've done it for one of our clients in the past, but most are happy to stick with the /pages element - it really doesn't have that much effect.