ASP Pages and Search Engines

[nym_fan]

(I hope I put this thread in the correct section, if not, I will post it again elsewhere)

I have a link exchange page on my web site. It is working well for me and is ranked nicely in Google, etc. I have done all the work by hand but now I am thinking of automating the entire process using ASP.

If I switch over to ASP, my link.htm file which has all the links and the file that the SEs are pointing to will no longer be used. So my questions are:
1) How well do ASP pages index(if at all)?
2) Should I keep the link.htm and use a redirect script or
3) Should I keep the page with some reciprocal link content (to keep it ranked well, hopefully) and then link that to the new asp files?

I am worried about losing the ranking I have now, and if the redirect script is someting the SE will like. If I had to decide today, I would do option #3 and tell my links partner about change.
Does this sound like a good plan?

[GWJ]

I'll take a stab at 1). If the ASP page does not contain any ?, etc. then all should be good. I do hear on the forum that some SEs are now indexing URLs with ?.

Brian

[Woz]

nym_fan,

I am in a similar situation where I have links to my site in a database and then served via ASP. As always, as long as the address is static, ie., no "?" as CJW says, then there is no problem.

I would put a redirect on your HRML recip link page with a delay so as not to upset the SEs, and then remove it when it's traffic dies.

Onya
Woz

[DaveAtIFG]

>(to keep it ranked well, hopefully)

Why? I don't believe the link boost is at all dependent on the page's rank, it's based on the quality and relevance of the links the page contains. Unless it generates cosiderable traffic, there's no reason to be concerned about it's rank.

[click watcher]

>>>If the ASP page does not contain any ?

i have a site with several top 5 results (on google) with urls of the format...

www.mysite.com/items.asp?catid=xx

although i would add that they are targeting keywords that return under 5k results

[Woz]

click_watcher,

I also have pages with "?" in Google, secondary listing pages from the major pages. However, as we understand, google is the only SE spidering pages with dynamic URLs.

So if these pages are getting good results it would be well worth converting them to no "?" for all the other SEs. You may be missing out on some traffic...

Onya
Woz