On September 17, 2024, OIT will roll out another improvement for Sitecore to enhance our Search Engine Optimization (SEO). As mentioned in SMU.edu and SEO: A Constant Evolution, improving our website’s SEO will increase its visibility in Google, Bing, and other search engines. To help reach that goal, OIT is standardizing the use of lowercase characters in our URLs and is now ready to implement the change to Sitecore for links created with the internal link feature.
For those of you who are not Sitecore authors, currently, when Sitecore’s internal link feature generates a link, the link text reflects the capitalization of the item in the directory. For example, if you linked the Dedman Law within Sitecore, the link would reference www.smu.edu/Law. After the update, linking to the site would use www.smu.edu/law for the URL.
Since search engines are case-sensitive, from their perspective, www.smu.edu/Law and www.smu.edu/law are different URLs due to the difference in capitalization. When different URLs can access the same content, our search-engine score is diluted, potentially causing our search results to get worse placement, such as appearing further down the page in the results.
This change is designed not to affect any data*, and authors will not need to change their editing habits. It is simply a configuration change that adjusts how Sitecore creates internal links.
* Please Note: OIT recommends that Sitecore authors save any changes before the update is applied, as there will be a brief outage in which users might lose unsaved changes if they are authoring in wcmstage during the deployment window between 7 and 7:15 p.m. on Tuesday, September 17, 2024.
