What Is It With Sharepoint Sites and SEO?

Every now and again we need to do SEO for a site developed in Sharepoint.

Now, I have nothing against Sharepoint, I am sure it is a great product and I know that lot of big organisations are using it, however, it seems as if Sharepoint developers have a real blind spot when it comes to SEO.

Some of the problem areas that I have picked up with sites built in Sharepoint (I am going to use the domain 'somedomain.co.za' as the example - this is a fictitious site just to illustrate the principles):

1. The main home page url normally redirects to some other page, for example http://www.somedomain.co.za/Pages/welcome.aspx . This is very bad from an SEO perspective. It is much better to change this so that the home page of the site is on http://www.somedomain.co.za and not redirected to a different page. The problem is that the home page of the site is really the most important page from an SEO perspective and will normally get the most links. So the links will all point to http://www.somedomain.co.za while the actual site runs on http://www.somedomain.co.za/Pages/welcome.aspx. This means that the link juice could be diluted! Similarly, the inner pages are sometimes in the format: http://www.somedomain.co.za/Pages/something.aspx?product=someprod. While Google and other search engines normally do not have problems indexing these types of pages, they are really not very 'friendly' from a search engine friendly perspective and pages with straight forward urls such as http://www.somedomain.co.za/products/someprod.html tend to do better overall.
2. The titles of the inner pages can be set to be more unique, but what I normally find is that they are set to the basic minimum of what the page could be about, i.e. very short and not making use of the full 64 Characters that are available. This link offers a solution for customising Sharepoint titles: http://weblogs.asp.net/avnerk/archive/2007/04/11/customizing-moss-page-title.aspx
3. It would also be good if they can install an automatic XML sitemap generator for the google webmaster side and getting the site indexed properly – luckily there are some plugins available for Sharepoint.
   

   Here is a link to a resource that helps with getting Sharepoint sites to be SEO friendly

   http://apoint2share.com/?p=64

Overall, it just seems as if developers who work with Sharepoint just seem to be extra SEO-unaware. Possible reasons that I can think of are:

1. Sharepoint is mostly used for Intranets and occasionally for extranets ('normal websites'). Intranets do not require SEO, so naturally that attitude is carried forward to the extranet Sharepoint site?

2. Sharepoint is often used in bigger corporations, and bigger companies do not care about SEO!

Any comments?