Question

I have implemented URL mapping in our ASP.NET 4 application, but I have a problem with some of our content.

Some of our products has a hyphen “-” or a question mark “?” in them. It’s not an option to remove that. A productname could be “My Product – Good for you?“.

We use two custom made methods, MakeUrlSeoReady and MakeUrlNonSeoReady. We replace space like this: Replace(” “,”-“), as this is the most SEO-friendly solution. However, we also need to make this work with both question marks and hyphens.

The reason we use the MakeUrlSeoReady / NonReady methods is to be able to show the “real” name.

Currently the mapping is defined as follows:

routes.MapPageRoute("Produkt visning",
                    "artikler/{Categoryname}/{SubCategoryname}/{ProductName}",
                    "~/SingleProduct.aspx");

So what I do is I retrieve the product depending on the ProductName. I use two methods I’ve created:

    public static string MakeUrlNonSeoReady(string text)
    {
        return text.ToLower().
           Replace("oe", "ø").
           Replace("aa", "å").
           Replace("ae", "æ").
           Replace("-", " ");
    }

    public static string MakeUrlSeoReady(string text)
    {
        return text.ToLower().
            Replace("ø", "oe").
            Replace("å", "aa").
            Replace("æ", "ae").
            Replace(" ", "-");
    }

So in the SingleProduct.aspx page I use the following string to get from our database:

string categoryName = HelperFunctions.MakeUrlNonSeoReady(Page.RouteData.Values["ProductName"]);

But this will of course not work. So any help is really appreciated 🙂

Answer 1

An arguably cleaner and simpler method is to use a unique product identifier that is numerical or alphanumerical and is natively HTML encoded, and then simply put the product name as an unused parameter for SEO or search purposes.

MSDN RouteCollection.MapPageRoute Method (String, String, String, Boolean, RouteValueDictionary)

routes.MapPageRoute("Produkt visning", 
                "artikler/{Categoryname}/{SubCategoryname}/{ProductIdentifier}/{ProductName}", 
                "~/SingleProduct.aspx", false, new RouteValueDictionary 
    { { "ProductName ", string.Empty } });