Question

I am building a product catalog for a customer website under ASP.NET using .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. Each product has a part number and an OEM part number (all globally unique).

For SEO purposes I would like the OEM part number to be as close as possible to the actual domain name.

How do I build a routing rule that allows me to do this:

http://www.myDomain.com/oemPartNumber
http://www.myDomain.com/myPartNumber

while still being able to do this:

http://www.myDomain.com/welcome
http://www.myDomain.com/products
http://www.myDomain.com/services
http://www.myDomain.com/contact

I would also love to hear your other SEO suggestions (we are primarily interested in Google) if you have any.

Thanks.

IMPORTANT: This not an MVC site, so I don’t have controllers.

Answer 1

You should be able to specify something like http://www.mydomain.com/oempartnumber/oem and http://www.mydomain.com/mypartnumber/pn. There must be something in the url that allows you to choose the controller you want to use and further more allow you to distinguish between a part number and an oem part number (unless those are also unique against one another. If there will never be overlap between oem and pn then you could have http://www.mydomain.com/{partnumber}/pn.

RouteTable.Routes.Add(new Route
{
Url = "[query]/pn",
Defaults = new { controller="PartNumber", action = "Details" },
RouteHandler = typeof(MvcRouteHanderl)
});

You could use some trickery with a route like this:

routes.MapRoute(
    "Part number",
    "{partNumber}",
    new { controller = "Part", action = "Display" },
    new
    {
        partNumber = @"\d+" // part number must be numeric
    }
);

But the problem here is that an OEM part number that is not actually a part number (such as “ave-345”) would not match!

UPDATE: In reading I noticed that you said “this is not an MVC site so I don’t have controllers!”…OH! That changes things. In that case you can check to see if the directory exists where you pass in http://www.mydomain.com/1234 and if not you can test it for a product number. This would have to be done in a HttpModule though so you can catch it before your page is executed. Then on the server side you can direct the page to http://www.domain.com/productdetails?pid=1234.

Take a look here to understand that: http://www.15seconds.com/Issue/020417.htm

For this you will have a class that inherits from IHttpModule. Then you can specify an Init method

public void Init(HttpApplication application)
{
    //let's register our event handler
    application.PostResolveRequestCache +=
        (new EventHandler(this.Application_OnAfterProcess));
}

This then points to your Applicaton_OnAfterProcess method:

private void Application_OnAfterProcess(object source, EventArgs e)

{
    HttpApplication application = (HttpApplication)source;
    HttpContext context = application.Context;

    ...

Inside of here you can specify some rules about what you are looking for.

I usually do something along the lines of

if (!System.IO.File.Exists(application.Request.PhysicalPath)) //doesn't exist
{
    //you test for your product ID here
    ...
    //if you find it stuff it into a ProductID variable for later...

Once you isolate your product ID you can then rewrite the URL (server side) and direct the user to the proper productDetails.aspx page.

context.RewritePath("~/products/productDetails.aspx?ProductID=" + ProductID.ToString());

So while the user and google sees http://www.mydomain.com/1234 your application will see http://www.mydomain.com/products/productdetails.aspx?productid=1234 and you can code against it as usual.

I hope this is what you were looking for instead!