Strange URL's for client's site

[everestagency]

We just picked up a new client and I've been doing some digging around on their site. They have quite the wide variety of URL's that make for a rather confusing experience.

One of the milder examples is their "About" page. Normally I would expect something along the lines of:

www.website.com/about

I see:

www.website.com/default.asp?Page=About

I'm typically a graphic designer and know basically nothing about code, but I just assume this has something funky to do with how their website was constructed. I'm assuming this isn't particularly SEO friendly, but it doesn't seem too bad. Until I got to another section of their site. It's a section that logically should look like:

www.website.com/training/public-seminars

It's:

www.website.com/default.asp?Page=MT&Area=Seminars&Sub=MRM

Now that's nonsensical to me! Normally if a client has terrible URL's, I'd say let's do some redirects, but I guess I'm a little intimidated by these. Do the URL's have to be structured like this for some reason? Am I missing some important area of coding here?

However, the most bizarre example is a link back to their website from yellowpages.com. Where normally I would expect it to lead to their homepage, I get this bizarre-looking thing:

http://website1-px.rtrk.com/?utm_source=ReachLocal&utm_medium=PPC&utm_campaign=AssetManagement&reference_id=15&publisher=yellowpages&placement=ypwebsitemip&action_target=listing_website

And as you browse through the site, that strange domain stays. For example the About page is now:

http://website1-px.rtrk.com/default.asp?Page=About

I would try to google this but I have no idea where to even start! What is going on with these links? Will we be able to fix them to something presentable without breaking their website?

[everestagency]

Thank you for the great advice Dirk!

I will likely have to get one my more technical co-workers to help with this, but now I can at least adequately describe the problem and solution to this. Three separate URL's for the home page alone is definitely a priority to be fixed.

Thank you again!

[DirkC]

Hi,

You're quite right that having clean readable url's are usefull - both for visitors & bots.

There is no technical need to have these 'ugly' urls - as they can always be rewritten to something nicer. You will have to use a combination of URL rewriting & redirects) - you can find some useful links here on how to implement the rewriting (the article is not very recent - but these basics haven't changed). If they use a CMS it could also be useful to check the documentation - almost every decent CMS offers some build-in rewriting functionality.

The second issue with the strange domain name can be solved with a 301 redirect - by adding these lines in the .htaccess file of the "strange domain"

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$
RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

(no need to tell that you'll have to replace olddomain & newdomain by the actual domain names)

Apart from the wrong domain the issue with the tracking parameters in

http://website1-px.rtrk.com/?utm_source=ReachLocal&utm_medium=PPC&utm_campaign=AssetManagement&reference_id=15&publisher=yellowpages&placement=ypwebsitemip&action_target=listing_website

could be solved by either a redirect or a canonical url. With the redirect rule above the webwite-px.rtk.com will be redirected to www.yourdomain.com - but this doesn't get rid of the tracking code.

You could put a self referencing canonical url in the head of the pages -

or strip of the parameters using a redirect (you can find an example on how this could be done here

If you use the canonical solution - it could be a good idea to strip off the parameters in Google Analytics

Hope this helps,

Dirk