asp pages

are .asp pages heavily penalized?

[raveon]

Wow, what a resource you guys have put together here.. very nice. It's been a few years since I did much SE work myself but I will be doing lots in the future (mainly because of the emergence of the PPC SEs and some common biz sense coming to the field).

I like to build sites using SSIs and .asp pages are ideal... do they suffer much against .htm and .html?

I would imagine pay SEs have more relaxed rules about page extensions and things like redirects.... yes/no?

[Brett_Tabke]

Thanks and Welcome Raven. You have it figured. The PFP (pay for play) engines don't have a problem with the dynamic file extensions. The free ones still do. Most of us that run intense ssi (like this site), have turned on ssi for stock file types.

[raveon]

"Most of us that run intense ssi (like this site), have turned on ssi for stock file types."

So SSIs are Ok but the extension should still be .htm if possible. OK I've got it.

Must be a lot of work though with Forum software such as this (unless you built it yourself' excellent forum software BTW, is it custom?). All of my sites use the free Snitz asp forum software (http://forum.snitz.com/) and the changes you suggest could be done, but might be risky. I'll try it out on a dev site;

1. tell the server to recognize .htm as .asp for that site only
2. do a global "find and replace" to change all instances of " .asp " to " .htm (or .html) ".

That should do it and make my Forums work as SE magnets to boot!

[Woz]

>but the extension should still be .htm

not necessarily. As a general rule clean ASP urls are OK and are treated the same as HTML. By clean I mean a url then ends in .asp with not question mark after it.

If you do have a question mark, then Google will spider and list OK but the other Engines will not. Having said that, some people say that AV will as well but I have no proof.

Onya
Woz

[themoff]

> The PFP (pay for play) engines don't have a problem
> with the dynamic file extensions. The free ones still do.

My site is a non-commercial one, and therefore I can't/don't pay for listings. It is completely ASP based, with no html pages. Part of the reason for this is that there is a lot of database driven stuff, and I don't have time to code lots of static HTML pages. My site is hosted on a shared server, and changing file extentions is not an option - is is .asp or the script won't be executed.

Do I need to worry about the effect this will have on my SE ratings? Do I need to look at giving spiders a load of HTML links? Amongst other things, there are about 300 pages of juicy content on my site that are accessed through a URL archive.asp?id=xxx (where xxx is a number), and I would hate for them not to get indexed.
(Thinking about it, I could always generate .html copies of ASP pages whenever the database updates, and feed these to the spiders.....hmmm....could be done....)

Robin

[agerhart]

>>>>>.(Thinking about it, I could always generate .html copies of ASP pages whenever the database updates, and feed these to the spiders.....hmmm....could be done....) >>>>>

I would do this if I were you....sounds like it would work better than sitting back and waiting for Google or another SE to give you a good ranking for a URL with a ? in it. The majority of my clients have URLs with the ? in them, and I have had to find ways around this as the SEs will only index it and give it a good ranking once in a very long while......In my opinion.

[themoff]

If I go with creating HTML pages, can anyone suggest how I get around the problem that the spiders will index the HTML, and present the HTML page in search results, but I want any human visitors to get an ASP page?
Any kind of meta redirect on the HTML page would, I assume, harm my ratings.
Suggestions?

Cheers, Robin
PS Should I be posting this on a different forum?

[Xoc]

Generally ASP questions go in the Server-Side Scripting forum. However, what you are looking for is called cloaking. See the cloaking forum for a lengthy discussion. There is even the start of a cloaking script for IIS in one thread.