Subdomain Redirects - Can They Handle Unwieldy URLs?

[eljuan]

So I have a client that has these incredibly long, complicated URLs for their web pages and those are completely unusable. I want to recommend to them to create a sub-domain for each product. However, they obviously don't want to have duplicate content up there. I am curious if we just make them a 302 redirect to the long, complicated URL, will Google be okay with that on search results? I could also just have them create folders and put index files in each of them that redirect also. Either way, I don't want Google to zap them because of the redirect, but I do want Google to be able to find the pages easier which I don't believe they can find right now.

Does anyone have any advice? I would surely appreciate it.

Thanks!

[tedster]

a sub-domain for each product

Probably not the best approach, unless there are only a very small number of products. This sounds like a CMS that isn't doing the job very well. You are better off with an internal page I'd say - much less like a spammer's footprint.

But in my opinion, you'd do best to introduce some real url rewriting in the first place, rather than this kind of unwieldy work-around.

[edited by: tedster at 2:07 am (utc) on May 14, 2009]

[eljuan]

that's what I was afraid of. unfortunately, the client isn't going to fix the long, complicated URL issue. I tried that one already and it isn't going to happen. Hmm... I guess we could create some static pages with original content to handle this. Takes more time, but probably more worth it in the long run.

thanks!

[AnkitMaheshwari]

Also, use only 301 redirects (if any) to avoid any issues with Google rankings.