Thread: How to Modify Web Page URL without Changing Content?

I would like to be able to modify the URLs of existing pages on my web site to make the URLs even more search-engine-friendly that they are now.

There's no need to change the content, just the URLs.

How can this be done, without revising all the web site navigation links? We use ASPDNS 8.0.0.

Thank you.

As indicated here http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/p-505-seo.aspx , our software is actually pretty search engine friendly with the URLs as is. In order to change it more, you would need to change the URL rewriting system.

How are you wanting the URLs to look?

To clarify, we want to change the content in the "name" field of a product or topic to incorporate more keywords that will appear in the URL.

Specifically, when we initially set up the site, for products we entered the product title in the name field, which then became part of the URL. When we created a new topic, we entered a topic name that became part of the URL.

Now that we're ASPDNS and SEO veterans (!), we want to go in and tweak the content in the "name" field for both products and topics to incorporate more keywords. If we were to just change the name, and then try to link on the page that's in our current website navigation, the page then becomes "page not found."

So, how do we change the content of the URL (not its structure) while avoiding "page not found" errors?

Any response to this?

Prior to version 9, this involved customization to create custom rewrite rules and to then utilize them across the site. Even then, there is little to no control over managing these rules once implemented. In version 9, we have implemented a routing engine which is capable of rewriting and serving both incoming and outgoing requests. The rules are customizable and can be maintained from the web.config file, and can even utilize different file extensions. For example, p-1-simple-product.aspx can be served as simple-product/store/mystore/products/1.html just by changing the product rule in the web.config from

Code:

<add name="Product" url="p-{ProductID}-{SEName}.aspx" virtualPath="~/showproduct.aspx" checkPhysicalUrlAccess="false" />

to

Code:

<add name="Product" url="{SEName}/store/mystore/products/{ProductID}.html" virtualPath="~/showproduct.aspx" checkPhysicalUrlAccess="false"/>

This is not a feature that can be ported back to previous versions however...you would need to upgrade to version 9+ to take advantage of the routing engine.

I tried using the rewrite in V9 to create html urls. The rewrite worked to change my navigation, but if you click a link, then you get a page not found error, rather than it pulling up the correct page. Leaving the webconfig as original, with aspx, the nav works fine.

Am I missing something?

This is on a development site and isn't live.

Thanks.

Hmmm, I played with this here and it looks like there are some problems with changing the file extension under certain circumstances. I'll check with the devs and see if we can get this fixed.