We have a website that is used to showcase our various products. The website uses MVC4 and subdomains areas.
- product1.website.com
- product2.website.com
We use the subdomain to determine which area to route the request.
Lately we have been getting http HEAD requests to our site using the IP only. Without the subdomain we can't know which area to send the request.
What should we do?
- Send back a 404
- Redirect to our most important area/product
- Redirect to our company website
why not redirect users to an overview page where they see a short list of the products. In this way you can redirect them behind the screens to whereever you want without hem knowing and this also has the ability to be used when user make typo in the url so that they are 'guided' to the right product and even find other ones.
-a 404 usually makes people seek elsewhere since tey think they have the wrong IP - redirect to most important product may result in confusion when you change your major product (users tend to bookmark a lot of useless urls) - redirect to the company website is to my opinion the lesser of all evils, but users tend to get lost when redirected to a 'general' website.
example: you're looking for Windows 8 download and have the IP bookmarked - 404 error: oh the page no longer exists - main product: windows 9 is out but for some reason you still need windows 8: you spend more time looking for what you really need and probably find it elsewhere - overview page: you see what you need in a list and if the list is short you quickly find it, otherwise a simple search reveals the item also.
so redirect to overview page is still a winning shot in my opinion