Wildcard Nodes

There may be scenarios where you want to create “catch-all” nodes in your content tree, i.e. if the request doesn’t find a match, apply some default processing. In Sitecore, these are referred to as “wildcard” nodes. To create a wildcard node, add a content item named “*”:
I. Home
  a. Products
    i. *
    ii. Product A

When a request comes in for /Products/Product A.aspx, Sitecore will find the /sitecore/content/Home/Products/Product A content item. If a request comes in for /Products/Product B.aspx, Sitecore will find the /sitecore/content/Home/Products/* content item.

Wildcards may also be nested, for example:
I. Home
  a. Products
    i. *
      1. *
    ii. Product A

In this case, a request for /Products/Product B/Attribute 1.aspx will be a match for the /sitecore/content/Home/Products/*/* item in the content tree.There are varied uses of this feature. The following article describes how to use this feature to embed query string values in URLs: http://larsnielsen.blogspirit.com/archive/2007/01/09/sitecore-avoiding-query-string-in-dynamic-url.html.