Googlebot URL Alias Error in CMS400 7.6
Category: Mark Cline, Ektron
We were working on a project for a client where we implemented the latest version of the Ektron CMS400.Net (7.61 at the time). One of the features we were really excited about was the new automatic aliasing. This is the feature that will build the link to the page based on the folder and content titles so that your URLs are SEO friendly.
After the site went live, the client noticed that Google was not correctly indexing the site. When we reviewed the Googlebot results we confirmed that all the pages were issuing a 500 server error. After closer inspection, it appeared that the Googlebot program would get the 500 server error after processing the "form" tag of only aliased pages. Regular links indexed correctly. In addition, the form action had leading dots (ex. action="../page.aspx") which didn't match the actual page path.
What's interesting is that whenever I reviewed the pages or crawled them with my site crawler, everything worked correctly and no errors were generated. To help see the site like Googlebot, I installed a Firefox plugin called User Agent Switcher that allowed me to change the User Agent and view the page as Googlebot would view it. Once I did this I was able to duplicate the error.
After lots of research, and no good suggestions, I noticed that we were not using the latest version of the ASP.Net 3.5 Framework. After installing the latest service pack, Googlebot started correctly crawling the site pages.
Posted By: Mark Cline | Date Published: 6.25.2009 | Comments (0)