web application design problem related to search engine optimization

Question

Hello, We have a website which has a decent customer base. We recently started a subdomain which will be used to serve specific content from the website. We need to redirect the users to subdomain when he/she tries to access the designated content from the old domain. For example I have old domain www.marketplace.com and a subdomain www.paper.marketplace.com. The web application serving both the domains is same. So when the user tries access a URL 'www.marketplace.com\paper\viewarticle' he should be redirected to 'www.paper.marketplace.com\paper\viewarticle'. Since it's the same web application serving both the domains I wanted do this using a servlet. The servlet should redirect user to subdomain based on certain configuration. I've thought about using a properties file in each folder that has a flag that determines if the request accessing the .html/.jsp files should be redirected or not.

the .jsp/.html files can be added/removed to deployment at runtime which is also a key for choosing this design.

Please comments on this approach or suggest any other ideas if you think it's better.

Thanks.

Answer 1

you can do this redirect, as long as the redirect follows some sort of convention, using apache rewrite rules. This way the overhead on your server to parse request, redirect and parse request again is reduced to just parsing the CORRECT request. This will for sure improve the performance on your site by reducing the number of requests.

Rewrites can be done with other servers, not just apache. Apache is just the most documented. Read Apache Rewrite Guide for more info.