Software for ASP pages

[Friar99]

I came across an article on a software called XQASP from Exception Digital Enterprise Solutions. The software replaces the "?" and "&" characters in dynamic sites with with alternate characters, making it easier for spiders to crawl a site.

Has anyone used this or another software that does the same thing? Does it work?

[chris_f]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Friar99,

There is plenty of software offering this type of url rewritting capability. Remember, you will need to install a component on the server for it to work, so you can't have shared hosting (unless you have a really nice host).

The software normally works really well, however, you usually will have to change all the links on your site to the new special characters. Also, you are still in danger of having very long url's. Search engines can cope with alot but make sure you don't have a too longer url.

Chris

[anxvariety]

i recently built a dynamic test page w/ static url for my site with the objective of seo.

basically just stored the 'id' of the item i wanted to pull in the file name itself.. then i parsed it when the page was requested and did the database call.

if you get in touch with me in whatever form is appropriate on this board i will show you how to do it.

or i can post a thread on it if there isnt already one..

anx

[pageoneresults]

The software normally works really well, however, you usually will have to change all the links on your site to the new special characters.

XQASP must work a little differently than IISRewrite. That is what we are currently utilizing and you would use normal urls like this...

domain.com/widgets/blue.asp

It is all controlled through an .ini file that resides on the server. This .ini file can control one site or a group of sites.

Be aware, that if you make changes to the .ini file, you need to reboot for the changes to take effect. It can be tedious at first, but once you figure it out and set it up, you just leave it alone. Yes, you will need to update urls throughout the site to the new clean format.

Also, you need to figure out a way to get the spider into the content. You'll probably end up developing index pages for each product category. Those would be linked to from a main index and/or site map.

You have to get the spider in there to generate the database queries. Once you do that, just sit back and watch Googlebot go wild. It's a pretty amazing sight!

Again, make sure you can lead the spiders into the database. You need to have a roundtrip linking structure so all content can be indexed. There may be different ways to do this, I've found the above method to be extremely effective.