Out of the box, DNN does a couple of very bad things as far as search engine optimization is concerned. While I was learning how DNN worked, I had Google index one of our sites and it indexed every page on the site AND the unique URL page for Login, Register, Privacy Policy and Terms of Use, making my site index 5 times larger than it really was. Very bad! This redundant content could hurt search engine rankings...

The first concern is the links to Login and Register. By default, with search engine friendly URLs turned on, a unigue URL is created on EVERY page for the Login and Register. This can be quickly fixed...

The fix:

1. Create a new page called Login
2. Add the Account Login module to the page
3. Create another page called Profile (you can call it whatever you want)
4. Add the User Account module to the page
5. Go to Admin > Site Settings
6. Expand Advanced Settings
7. Under Page Management select the page you first created for the Login Page
8. For the User Page, select the Profile page you created
9. Click the Update link at the bottom of the Site Settings page

Now, DNN will use the "hardcoded" links for all Login/Register links on the site.

The second badness DNN does is with it's default DotNetNuke skins. Within the skin is the DNN Tag/Token for Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. Once again, this is a unique URL for EVERY single page on the website for both pages. This one is a little more difficult and requires that you edit the skin. So, open up your favorite editor and modify the skin by removing the tags/tokens for "PRIVACY" and "TERMS" to use a real hardcoded links. While most skin developers include these tags/tokens in their skins, until the DNN core team fixes this issue, I would recommend removing them.

Update 1/5/2005:

I submitted an issue to the DNN Bug Tracker on 1/1/2005: DNNP-2289

No response yet...