Business Catalyst now lets you to completely customize blog post URLs, giving you the option to create search engine friendly blogs. For existing blogs, you will notice the URL has the below format:

www.mysite.com/_blog/My_Blog

All blogs had the _/blog/ prefix with the blog name. With the new SEO friendly blog URLs, you can customize the blog URL so that you can remove the _/blog/ prefix.

Note: All sites created after April 22nd 2013 will have the SEO friendly URLs for blogs enabled by default.

To enable SEO friendly URLs for existing sites, follow the instructions below.

Enabling SEO friendly URLs for existing blogs

1. Log in to the admin of your site and select Modules > Blogs.
2. If you have multiple blogs on your site, select the blog by clicking the blog name.
3. A dialog is displayed above your blog posts, click the Enable Now button.

Once you have enabled SEO Friendly URLs:

• the "_blog" particle will be removed from the blog URL
• the "post" particle will be removed from the blog post URL
• previous underscores (_) in blog or blog post URL will be replaced by dashes (hyphens)
• 301 redirects are created automatically to redirect old style URLs to new style URLs:
  • A blog post that was previously accessible on  www.mysite.com/_blog/My_Blog/post/This_awesome_post will be redirected automatically to: www.mysite.com/my-blog/this-awesome-post
• You'll be able to rename the blog URL and the 301 redirects from the old style URLs will point to the new URL

Customizing the blog URL

Once you have enabled SEO friendly URLs for your blogs, you can then customize the blog URL.

1. Select Modules > Blog. If you have multiple blogs, select one of your blogs by clicking the blog name.
2. You will now see the URL section found under the blog name. Click Edit next to the URL.
   
      
       Notice that the /_blog/ section of the URL has been removed.
3. Enter your own blog URL and then click Save.

What about my old indexed URLs

When you enable SEO friendly URLs for blogs, all old blog post URLs are 301 redirected to the new blog post URLs. This means that any indexed URLs in search engines will be redirected to the new URLs in a SEO friendly manner.

Example:

Anyone trying to access:

www.mysite.com/_blog/My_Blog/post/This_awesome_post

is redirected to:

www.mysite.com/my-blog/this-awesome-post

Working with blog post meta data

To learn how to set up individual meta data for each blog post, please have a look at this related article.