Search engine friendly pages ASP

[philplatt]

I currently developing a site that will be using asp and a database, but I've been thinking alot about how to make sure that my site is search engine friendly.

When my site is finished about 99% of the pages will be created on the fly from a database, and the page name will be something like page.asp?pageid=10 (Not search engine friendly)

To make my pages search engine friendlt I want them to read something like page10.html

Does any one have an tips on how to do this? I've heard of a com object called ISAPI_Rewrite that does exectly this but I don't suppose that it is installed here.

Thoughts anyone?

[RFH Reseller: askjim]

Create a 404 custom asp error page which looks at the url and from the url it does a server.execute to the desired page. e.g. www.yourdomainname.com/page10.html do a server.execute of page.asp and pass to the page the parameter 10 via a session parameter.

[Staff: Warren Ashcroft]

When my site is finished about 99% of the pages will be created on the fly from a database, and the page name will be something like page.asp?pageid=10 (Not search engine friendly)

Youd be surprised, most of the major search engines are fine with URLs with data.

[RFH Customer: Reactivate]

Like Warren says they are mostly fine.

It's only if you start passing loads of arguments they have problems like
page.asp?something=1&this=2&that=3

[RFH Reseller: nick]

Like Warren says they are mostly fine.

It's only if you start passing loads of arguments they have problems like
page.asp?something=1&this=2&that=3

I have certainly read this too, but I think it only really applies to very large query strings, say 10 arguments or more.
The main reason for the 'friendly' url these days is aesthetically for the end user, and tbh I actually doubt that many people give it a second thought.

[Staff: Warren Ashcroft]

For example:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...nG=Search&meta=

Look at all those green links.

[RFH Reseller: nick]

For example:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...nG=Search&meta=

Look at all those green links.

true, but as yet I've never seen a search engine spider filling in a search query and indexing the resulting page.

[Staff: Warren Ashcroft]

true, but as yet I've never seen a search engine spider filling in a search query and indexing the resulting page.

No, I dont think it would submit forms...

[RFH Reseller: askjim]

From my experience of SEO a page with a friendly url will be ranked higher than the same equivalent page with horrible query string parameters. Its not to do with the fact that google cant spider pages with lots of query string parameters because google can.

Google will extract certain information from a page to help determine its page rank: url, file name, page title, meta data, page content, headings etc. It also looks at other information external to the page to determine its page rank: how many link point to the site, are the links from reputable sites, how often does the page content change etc.

Given a page with a url of www.ipod.com/ipodaccessories.html google will be able to extract useful information from the filename which can be used to rank the page compared to www.ipod.com/content.aspx?Page=1.

At one point google ranked pages higher if the search term existed in the domain name such as www.cheapipodaccessories.com.

James

[RFH Reseller: Sol]

No, I dont think it would submit forms...

This is why a site should implement a Robots.txt file. What you shuld do is create a page that produces links from the database query (ie. a page that gets all results). You then add this page to your robots.txt to tell the search engine to crawl this page and follow the links.

Some people put a 'hidden' link to this page on an existing page within the site. However, you need to be careful doing this as some search engines will not like the 'hidden' link. A good way around this is to incorporate a SiteMap and have that pull information from the database.