IIS and SEO

[North_Shore]

First of all I'm not a developer so my terminogolgy may not be correct.

We are moving our site (.asp) to a new hosting company, along with changing our dynamic URLs to static (IISrewrite). How do we make sure that the search engines don't see us as having duplicate content and that we still get the benefit of existing links? Do you incorporate a 301 anywhere? Like I said, I'm not technical but want to make sure the individuals implementing these changes understand what needs to be done.

[jonrichd]

It seems to me that you might be setting yourself up for problems unless you change the name of your dynamic page once you get to the new server.

When you use URL rewriting, the idea is to have all the links on your pages point to static URLS (domain.com/widgets.htm), and then your URL rewrite program silently rewriting that request to (domain.com/dynamic.asp?page=widgets). No one ever knows that the URL is being rewritten, and the true dynamic URLS are never exposed to anyone, even though they would work if someone typed them in.

The problem in your case is that you currently have links to dynamic.asp?page=widgets that the search engines know about. The spiders will continue to request dynamic.asp, even if you remove all links to the page when you do the conversion, at least for some period of time.

You can't do a 301 redirect from dynamic.asp?page=widgets to widgets.htm, because ultimately dynamic.asp is what gets called to display the page -- you would get into an endless redirection loop.

However, if in your new setup you rename dynamic.asp to something else (say, dyna.asp), and have your URL rewrite program redirect to dyna.asp, then you would be able to set up a 301 redirect from dynamic.asp?page=widgets to widgets.htm.

dyna.asp would never be seen by the spiders, and you should be OK once the engines figure out how you've switched from dynamic pages to static pages, which could take a few months.

Which brings up a second question: is it really necessary to switch from dynamic URLS to static URLS? The spiders have gotten a lot better in recent years in indexing dynamic URLS properly, unless you are storing a session ID in the URL. If you are ranking reasonably well, it might not be worth it to make the change.

[moehits]

Are there any good resources on doing this without a third party program on .NET?

[flyerguy]

Why not use a third party program? The tools are of course all there in IIS6 to do heavy-duty rewriting, as well as other good stuff like cache-control, however the typical MMC console is barbaric and doesn't show half the options available if you were to start playing with Metabase.xml and such.

Unless you are planning on writing your own ISAPI filters, and think you can do it for less than a couple hundred bucks of development time (not to mention to the small point that it also must be GOOD), just shell out the $ and get your rewrite issue solved 3rd party.

I highly recommend:

port80software.com

and

helicontech.com

I use tools from both companies on my servers and they are both very good. Port80's follow-up support is actually rabid.