.NET and Spiders

.aspx Search Engine unfriendly?

[FrenchGuy]

We have to decide which technology we will use for a site relaunch and .net ist an option.

Appart from the fact that we will loose existing rankings because of URL changes (.aspx!) my concern ist that I have no idea how will spiders react to an .aspx content.

Does anybody have any kind of experience with this issue?

[bcolflesh]

google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=%2E%2Baspx

Though you will see intial drops until you are fully re-spidered with the new URLs...

[Xoc]

If you like, you can use the .asp file extension for .net. The issue you run into is that you will then not be able to simultaneously use .asp for standard Active Server Pages.

The way to do that is to map the .asp extension to feed into the .net interpreter instead of the standard .asp interpreter. You can do that by:

1. Go into the IIS manager.
   
2. Select your web site.
   
3. Right click and select properties.
   
4. Click on the Home Directory tab.
   
5. Click the Configuration button.
   
6. Select the .aspx extension.
   
7. Click Edit.
   
8. Copy the path in the Executable section to the clipboard (ctrl+c).
   
9. Click Cancel.
   
10. Click the .asp extension.
    
11. Paste the content of the clipboard to the Executable section.
    
12. Click OK and close all the dialogs.
    
13. Rename your .aspx files to .asp and rebuild the project.
    

This should work.

Spiders will have no problem with .aspx as long as the spider doesn't have to click a button. If the content is static, the spider will see exactly what is in the editor when you do a View Source. Spiders don't generally care what the file extension is on a file.

[martyt]

You can also write a custom 404 handler in .NET that will redirect the former .asp pages to their new .aspx counterparts via a 301 Moved Permanently response. This will appease the search engines when they come crawling your site, and it will appease visitors who click on your indexed .asp links.

The added benefit of a custom 404 handler is that you get full control over what happens when users enter a bad URL - whether you issue a 404 or 301 or whatever is all up to you and you don't have to constantly beg your hosting provider to make changes for you.

This one is written in .ASP but should be directly portable to .aspx - I think I used it as the basis for the one I use on my .NET site:

[evolvedcode.net...]

It'll take a while for your .aspx pages to get indexed, but there aren't any search engines (at least none that matter) who are hostile to .ASPX file extensions.