Maintain web page URLs from your Office Live website - Office 365 Technical Blog - Office 365

Office 365 websites contain a different URL structure than Office Live Small Business websites. Specifically, there is an additional /pages/ included in your Office 365 website URL. So an “About Us” page in Office Live Small Business would have the URL http://www.contoso.com/aboutus.aspx, but the same “About Us” page in Office 365 would have the URL http://www.contoso.com/pages/aboutus.aspx. Additionally, there is no root “default.aspx” page, like http://www.contoso.com/default.aspx in Office 365; instead the domain name alone, like http://www.contoso.com, resolves to the new home page location at http://www.contoso/pages/default.aspx.

This isn’t a problem when accessing pages from your site, but it is with other sites have already linked to your Office Live Small Business web pages and for search engines that have already indexed and linked to your Office Live Small Business pages. They will get a “Page not found” message. To avoid this, you can create placeholder pages in Office 365 that have the same URL as your Office Live Small Business pages and then make them redirect to the new page location in Office 365 (that contains /pages/ in the URL). In addition, edit the root default page “default.aspx” in Office365 so that it redirects to the new home page. Search engines, as a result, will notice that the URL has changed and assign a search ranking to the new URL.

Note: To perform the following steps, you need to log onto your account with Internet Explorer and when signing in, you must choose the “Keep me signed in” option.

To create the redirect page in Office 365

Open Notepad and paste in the following code (replace portions in bold with your specific website or page name):

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<%@ Page Language="C#" %>
<html dir="ltr" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
<meta name="WebPartPageExpansion" content="full" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.contoso.com/Pages/aboutus.aspx" />

<title>About Us</title>
</head>

<body />
</html>
Save this file as a page that matches your Office Live Small Business website (in the above example, you would save it as “aboutus.aspx.”
Open Microsoft Internet Explorer, log onto your Office 365 account, and navigate to your Team Site, or, just enter your Team Site URL in a browser. For example, use http://www.contoso.com/teamsite or http://contoso.sharepoint.com/teamsite (replace ‘contoso’ with your domain or account name).
Important: When logging in, make sure you select Keep me signed in, otherwise, the below steps may not work.
On your Team Site, open your Documents library and check the Type box or one of the boxes beside your documents.
Click the Library tab and choose Open with Explorer.
In the Windows Explorer address bar, click your website address, for example, http://www.contoso.com or http://contoso.sharepoint.com (again, replace ‘contoso’ with your domain or account name), in order to navigate to the root of your website.
Copy the file you created earlier (in the above example, “aboutus.aspx”) and paste it at the root of your site (not in a subfolder).
Repeat these steps for each redirect web page you need to create.

To redirect the root default page in Office 365

With Windows Explorer still open at the root of your website, right-click the file default.aspx, choose Open with, and select Notepad.
Locate the following code on the page.

<asp:Content ContentPlaceHolderId="PlaceHolderAdditionalPageHead" runat="server">
<meta name="CollaborationServer" content="SharePoint Team Web Site" />
Add the following text immediately after this, but replace the portions in bold with your Office 365 website URL:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;
url=http://www.contoso.com/Pages/default.aspx" />
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.contoso.com/Pages/default.aspx" />
Save and close the page.

Learn more

To learn more about working with your Office 365 public website, see the following articles and videos on Office.com.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-online-small-business-help/CL102040066.aspx

Thank you

Special thanks to Jeremy Mazner and Brian Wright for their work on this blog post.

Tom Werner, Technical Writer

SharePoint Online/Office 365

office.com/sharepoint