Geeky urls to Search Engine Friendly urls in IIS without sacrificing incoming links

Question

I have a website where my present "geeky" urls look like:

http://www.bestatdubaiholidays.co.uk/pages/Quote/Details.aspx?GUID=01a25b0c-e0ac-40ba-abd1-298f3abd9612

I want to change these to Search Engine Friendly ones - something like:

http://www.bestatdubaiholidays.co.uk/the-palm-atlantis.aspx

or

http://www.bestatdubaiholidays.co.uk/the-palm-atlantis

I have hundreds of incoming links (from ad campaigns and other sites) to my geeky urls that I want to retain.

So if someone types a geeky url, I want the address bar to show the equivalent search engine friendly url.

Can anyone help? Referring to other articles won't help. Believe me, I've read every one of them. Any example urls will be helpful.

Answer 1

I suggest using a Front controller. This means that you use the rewrite engine of whatever httpd server you're using to redirect ALL requests to a single file (index.php or index.aspx or whathaveyou) and then you use code in that file to dispatch to the appropriate page. You can do a redirect from the geeky URLs to the friendly URLs, and if it's a friendly url then you load the appropriate page.

This would be way easier than writing huge rewrite rules for each type of page you might have. And this way all of the work is done in the same language your site is already running, so you don't have to learn and maintain a new file that is in its own language just for the redirection.

Answer 2

Use something like this http://blog.eworldui.net/post/2008/04/ASPNET-MVC---Legacy-Url-Routing.aspx

You don't have to use MVC, the routing classes are standalone now