The Mozilla Corporation sells a product named Firefox. They own firefox.com, but redirect it to mozilla.com/products/firefox/. That said, given Mozilla’s strategy with respect to add-ons, it would probably make sense for firefox.com/extensions/ redirect to addons.mozilla.org/extensions/firefox/ and for mozilla.com/products/firefox/extensions/ to also redirect to addons.mozilla.org/extensions/firefox/.

This brings up the larger issues around company-centric and product-centric URL design, a very interesting topic with no real consensus that I know about.

Anyone got anything else?

By suggesting redirects you’ve touched on an area I’ve been researching for a while and I’m currently of the opinion that it is not a good idea to use redirects as doorways to complex URLs. Sure it’s okay as a bandaid over top of a poorly architected website, but it IMO it probably points to poor information architecture.

I’d far prefer *not* to see redirects used to hide complex URLs. I think redirects are primarily to indicate resources have been moved during a rearchitecture. I’m sure there are contexts where the redirect approach you suggest might be the best architectural choice but I’m not currently aware of one I agree with.

In the case as you mentioned above, all URLs (firefox.com/extensions/, addons.mozilla.org/extensions/firefox/, and mozilla.com/products/firefox/extensions/) each providing a resource appropriate to the context likely with some shared information but not identical.

Regarding your comment’s regarding company-centric and product-centric URL Design, they are dead-on and that’s a subject I’m anxious to tackle in the future too!

Thanks again for participating.

On the Microoft one the WT.mc_id=0107_20 portion is added automagically by the analytics package WebTrends if it’s configured to pass the id in the querystring (which means it gets everyone, including those without cookies). The tabid portion is also not required in this case, it seems to be a CMS thing which defaults to 1 is removed (and most of the pages I saw just used 1). So you could have:

http://www.windowsmarketplace.com/category.aspx?bcatid=834

Which is basically the same as the firefox one except for a human unfriendly parameter name and value.

In an effort to provide the best possible customer experience, this page has been removed.

And no - there were no links on it to any of the missing downloads, nor can the site be searched - google was the only thing that found them again…

addons.mozilla.org

Remember AMO, remember it all.