How to get SE's to view ASP pages as HTML?

[dickbaker]

I've seen references here on WW about ways to have dynamic pages read as pure HTML when it comes to search engines.

Can anyone point me to a particular thread or to a site that explains how to do this?

In going through the search engine results, I see a whole bunch of my dynamic pages at the very end, with only the URL: [example.com...] while there's a whole page of information about the subcribing store in St. Louis on that page that could be indexed.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

[edited by: Xoc at 9:22 pm (utc) on Feb. 26, 2005]
[edit reason] changed to use example.com [/edit]

[txbakers]

dynamic pages are read as pure HTML by the search engines.

ASP Code is processed at the server before it gets sent to the browser. It becomes HTML by the time the spiders see it.

There is no difference.

You can translate your extension from ASP to HTML if you wanted to, but it would have absolutely no bearing on search engine results.

[jc2005]

To the best of my knowledge, some search engine spiders will not spider URLs with multiple levels of URL querystring (e.g. page.asp?a=1&b=7&c=fred&d=dog).

What you need to look out for is a thing called an ISAPI URL ReWriter. This is a DLL which lives inbetween IIS and the ASP worker process. It does a smoke&mirrors translation between incoming URL requests and the underlying ASP representation. So, the above example could be 'rewritten' as:

page_1_7_fred_dog.htm

...but the ISAPI filter translates this back so that the ASP worker process only sees the original form.

Submitting the 'rewritten' URL to search engines fools them into thinking they've got a valid, static html file which should be spidered properly.

You can do lots of clever stuff with ISAPI filters. You will need IIS admin access however, and VC++ or similar to write the thing in the first place. I'm happy to email you the source-code of my ISAPI if you're interested. Just ask.

John