Curious Case of Vanity URL's in AEM
Vanity URL's are used to provide short URL for frequently accessed pages. Generally this involves some configurations in web-server. In AEM, the fact that an Author (who doesn't have technical know-how) gets the ability to create vanity URL's as per changing business trends makes the Vanity functionality very powerful. But if not used properly, it can lead to a lot of problems with search engine ranking. Here, I will try to explain one such problem which is very common and a way to tackle it. Before, I explain the problem, a little background on how we end up in such situations. A typical flow where the URL user hits is the same has content hierarchy. But, rarely we see such simple cases. Because, no one likes long URL's and to expose our internal content hierarchy to the external world. Hence, there will be inbound and outbound URL mappings in publish which will make external URLs much more simple. If the user appends with HTML, it has to be rem