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Is it advisable to implement url routing for an asp.net(webforms) website which is one year old... What are the factors to be considered before implementing....


It is a web based product website developed my company and users should pay for using it...

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2 Answers 2

up vote 4 down vote accepted

Some of the factors I can think of from top of my head:

  • Does your boss/sponsor/client/guy-who-pays-the-bill understand the importance & wants it done?

  • How large is the user base? If it is a internal site with few users, it might not be a big deal to ask them to update their links, but for a large public facing site, it might not be so simple as the users might have many bookmarks etc. to the content

  • What kind of site is it? If it is like a news site, I think people visit it for the new content rather than very old articles, but it if a knowledge base of some kind (read MSDN-like) you can expect people to have a lot of bookmarks etc. to keep handy.

  • Is the site SEO'd & how important is not loosing the traffic to the site based on the old URL?

  • What is the plan to ensure that web search engines re-index your site pages & the old URL's are given a permanent move?

  • There is a great advantage in having a good simple URL, but are your users tech-savvy to use it or is it just a "next-shiny-thing" initiative pushed by the developers?


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User friendly urls will improve you site from the SEO point of view. If your site is public and present in search engines will be benefited with this change.

I have to disagree with Sunny in relation with old urls. It's not true that users won't be able to access to old urls, normally, you can create redirect rules to send user hitting the previous format to the new one.

So reasons I would evaluate are:
- How important is to improve the site from SEO point if view
- If old urls can be translated to new url format through redirect rules and the importance to this.

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@Claudio - perhaps I mis-communicated about the old URL's. I meant to say that the old URL's will need to have the redirect, hopefully the user will then add the new URL again to the favorites and you will need to continue to support the URL's. All this will be additional factors to consider... –  Sunny Apr 2 '10 at 14:53

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