Nate Klaiber

Managing Your URL’s

So, every now and then I read through the ‘tips’ from the W3C when validating a page. The one I received yesterday was geared towards “Managing URI’s.” Now, this is a fairly simple concept summed up with:

“Even though the Web is thought of as a ‘permanent’ media where documents would, ideally, reside forever, this does not mean that resources cannot be removed once they have been published on the Web. However, should you choose to remove a resource, should do it in a way that informs readers, caches and user-agents that it has not just disappeared, but was removed on purpose.”

One of the tasks I have with every site that I re-build is that of mapping previous URL’s and documents to their ‘new home’. With Barbour Publishing’s website, they had a previous structure with a Plone CMS. The domain itself has been around for a few years now, so by this time there were many people out there who had bookmarked, reviewed, or simply linked to a specific page (checked via Google). Authors would link to their author page and their books directly. If I were to ignore this, error logs would fill up rapidly with 404 requests to their pages. So, I mapped out every possible URL from the old system and simply directed them to the new page if applicable. Therefore, a book request that looked like book-detail?isbn=XXXXXX would now direct to /book/detail/title-of-the-book/. This would be set with a 301 Permanently Moved redirect to the server — letting search engines, caches, and other bots know that it has been moved for good.

This accomplished a few things:

• It updated our URL’s so that the previous bookmarked URL’s were not broken, but forwarded without a glitch.
• Search engines were able to update their index with the new site — and remove the old pages.
• Our analytics were able to track accordingly on the back end without having to group separate pages as the same location.
• We were able to move to a more permanent URL structure that is easier to manage.
• Our server logs were not filled with 404 requests, and those who were linking to use did not have to deal with dead links.

More information: http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/uri-manage

Coming Next!

• My review of “CSS Mastery” by Andy Budd
• My review of “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug