The "Page Aliases" tool allows you to create an "alias" URL that immediately redirects to any page in Nimbus that you define in the Page Aliases tool.
Say, for instance, that you want a quick and easy link to a page about your albums. That page is currently linked to http://my.photosit.es/about-us/products/albums - but you want to be able to tell your client to simply go to http://my.photosit.es/albums/
The short URL becomes an "alias" of the longer URL. You can define this in the Page Aliases tool. To get there, go to Settings > Page Aliases.
You will see two fields. The first is the "alias," which you can define by typing in the alias. (Don't include your domain name in the alias.) The alias is any path that follows the domain name. It could be as simple as "albums," as in our example, or as complex as you want, by adding slashes — "albums/sequoia/brown-leather."
The second field is a drop-down to all content in your Nimbus site, including blog entries. Just select the page to which you want the alias to redirect, click the "Add Page Alias" button, and you're done!
Under the Hood
You may be asking how this works "under the hood." The Page Aliases tool (and the SEO mapping tool) create alias URLs that immediately redirect to the "actual" URL using a method called a "301 Redirect." Search engines recognize a 301 redirect as a page that is "moved permanently" and simply update their databases with the new URL for the same search results.
As part of SEO Mapping Tools
Because page aliases utilize 301 redirects, they are SEO-friendly. Therefore, if you have existing page rankings in search engines that you want to preserve, you can use the Page Aliases tool to manually map the old URLs to the new page in Nimbus.
Following the album example, let's say you have an existing page for albums in your old (gross) Flash-based website. The URL that links to the album page on your old site is something like http://mydomain.com/movie.swf?page=albums. When you move your mydomain.com domain to Nimbus, you can create an alias to map the old URL to tne new page in Nimbus manually. Simply add "movie.swf?page=albums" as an alias, and select the "Albums" page from the drop-down menu.
When you go live with your site and move the mydomain.com domain to Nimbus, then anyone visiting the old URL http://mydomain.com/movie.swf?page=albums will be automatically redirected to the new albums page in Nimbus.
Multiple Domains
Page aliases work on all domains you have pointed to Nimbus. These are configured in the Domains and DNS settings panel. If you have multiple domains such as "mydomain.com," "mydomain.net," and "mydomain.info" all pointed to one Nimbus site, then the domain deignated as "primary" will always be active. All aliases will re-map to the primary domain, even if you type one of the secondary domains into the URL. So if "mydomain.com" is your primary domain, and you create an "albums" alias in Nimbus, then you can type any of the following:
http://mydomain.com/albums/ http://mydomain.net/albums/http://mydomain.info/albums/
...and all of these will redirect as aliases to your "albums" page as defined in the Page Aliases settings panel.
One alias per page
Each page in Nimbus is allowed only one alias, and this includes aliases defined by both the SEO mapping tool and Page Aliases tool. Search engines will penalize your page rankings if any one page has multiple 301 redirects pointing to it. In fact, having too many 301 reidrects pointing to one URL can blacklist your entire domain in search engines. We're lookin' out for ya here!
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