I’ve seen a fair number of posts already on SEO Friendly URLs, search engines love them apparently and as humans we love them too – although it could be argued that it is mainly for vanity reasons (go check out the product URLs on Amazon quickly…)

Whatever the argument, we agree that Semantic URLs are a good thing for us mere mortals and the vast majority of sites.

EncodeNameReplacements

The simplest way of achieving friendly URLs is by using a combination of settings. Firstly set the LinkManager (from Sitecore 6.6 onwards) to use lowercase urls and remove the aspx extension:

<linkManager defaultProvider="sitecore">
  <providers>
    <add name="sitecore" addAspxExtension="false" encodeNames="true" lowercaseUrls="true" ... />
  </providers>
</linkManager>

And then set encodeNameReplacements to replace spaces with dashes:

<encodeNameReplacements>
  ...
  <replace mode="on" find=" " replaceWith="-" />
</encodeNameReplacements>

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