Forum Moderators: phranque
If you want to increase your SEO/SERPS then you need to work on the (X)HTML you're serving. If you're using serverside languages then you simply need to work on the (X)HTML within the serverside code (but not necessarily the serverside code itself).
To the point I suppose: Using ASP versus not/something else will not change SEO; changing the (X)HTML code will (regardless of what you use to create/serve).
My initial plan is to change the index file to a content rich page and introduce meta's and alt tags wherever I can and a robot instruction file.
I'm still curious though about the severside pages. If its possible I'd like to change them all into html but with so much content and constant updates it might not be feasible. Thats why I thought if it was possible I'd find a process that generates pure html pages from ASP's. I guess in the end though I'll still be stuck with the ASP's and will have to work on the html part of the pages.
Oh well. Back to the drawing board.
Since the information to be indexed has to be called from a database, there is no way for the spider to enter and search the database.
If you want .html to be the extension for your ASP page you can get isapi rewrite if you're running IIS or use mod_rewrite if you're on Apache.
However, if you insist on using .htm, you can certainly click the Configuration button for the website in the IIS MMC and assign the ASP DLL to the .htm extension, which would assign ASP to pre-process your .htm files just like .asp pages.
The extension is not your problem though. If your URLs are [widgetworld.com...] *that* is likely what people are talking about not getting good *RANK* (ie Supplemental listings). You will still be *INDEXED* just fine but a lot of the engines will not give you good rank (Google likes to shove these in the Supplemental listings I notice).
If you have all that querystring information in your URL, you will get the same result whether it's an .asp extension or .htm. Again, the extension is irrelevant here.
If your page in question is [widgetworld.com...] or [widgetworld.com...] the *on page* optimization as well as the *off page* optimization is going to determine your ranking (assuming all things equal with domain age etc etc).
HTHs
But it sounds to me like your concern is with the dynamic HTML that doesn't exist until a user triggers it? (i.e. form submission, database search, etc.)
I'm curious. What is the current problem with the site? Is it not getting indexed or not ranking well? Maybe there are some very basic issues with your SEO that can be improved.
Here's how...
1) Launch your IIS Manager
2) Locate your website in the site tree
3) Right click on your site and select properties
4) Click on the home directory tab
5) In the Application Settings area of the home directory tab click the configuration button
6) If the .htm and .html extensions are not on the list then click 'add' otherwise choose edit
7) You'll have to browse to the asp.dll (windows\system32\inetsrv\asp.dll (select it)
8) enter .htm into the Extension field.
9) Limit verbs to GET, HEAD and POST
10) click ok and repeat steps 6 - 9 for .html
11) click ok
your done... but this really isn't necessary becase asp pages dynamic or not get indexed. If you still want to do this at least now you know how.
You are actually correct. During the early years of dynamic web sites, search engines did NOT like .asp and similar database-driven pages. The search engines adapted, briefly, and made changes to index dynamic pages better. However, in the past 18 months, there has been a shift to place more of an emphasis on content located at the top of the domain. For instance, if you have a dynamic site, and your default home page is default.asp, then more emphasis for ranking your site will be based on what's on that page as opposed to sub pages (ie. default.asp?page=products). Certain search engines ignore all data in a URL once the spider sees a?,= or &.
Does that make sense?
I've built a content management system using ASP and SQL that generates dyanmically named ASP pages, which helps. I'm very close to having it auto-build HTML from the dynamic pages, which is why I stumbled onto this thread.
If you are concerned with SEO for your site, while having a dynamic site is not a death knell, HTML will fare much better, at least right now.
<snip>
[edited by: trillianjedi at 7:08 pm (utc) on Feb. 1, 2006]
[edit reason] Please see TOS #13 - thanks ;-) [/edit]
I have personally built database driven ASP pages that are massively crawled (10K to 25K pages per day) by all of the major search engines. Also, many of these dynamic ASP pages have come up very high in search engine rankings.
You seem interested in the problems with URLs. I used keyword rich URLs for each item in the database and a modified 404 error page to display all of the content.
The keyword rich URLs look something like this:
[domainname.com...]
When a request comes in to this URL, my 404 page handler parses the URL and determines which product it matches in the DB and if I get a match, I return a product page that doesn't look like a 404.
The search engines still need to be able to find each dynamically generated ASP page. This is true no matter even if the pages are static, cgi, php, etc. Use the tips and techniques described in other topics on this site if you want to help get your pages indexed.
Remember: Keywords in the URL are only 1 part of SEO. A smart man wrote 26 SEO steps 4 years ago that are still quite valid today. [searchengineworld.com...]
Please don't make blanket statements like "If you have pages other than .html" you will have trouble, because it's just flat out wrong. Granted, if you dont know what the heck you are doing, you will have trouble. I would suggest if you don't know what you are doing, you will have equal trouble with your flat .html files too :)
but I believe further that spiders have preferences to the hyper text markup language than server driven pages
You show your lack of knowledge with that very statement.
SERVER SIDE CODE RETURNS STANDARD HTML (shouting intended). The spiders (or anyone for that matter) never see your server code..
And no, I am not about to 'chill' when you are trying to convince people about things that are wrong. A lot of newbies come here to learn, and I am sorry, but I wont just sit back and watch someone 'educate' them when they have no idea how server-side applications run.
I swear I am not intending this to go into a flame thread, but if you don't even understand how the hell server-side apps return HTML, how are you going to preach that they are somehow not good?
And, just for the record, I have 5 sites ranked #1-3 in google, Yahoo, MSN all done in ASP.NET and all in fairly competitive 'health-related' keywords... :)
The content of databases generally will not show up in a search engine result
This, of course, is true - but pages created from content stored in databases WILL show up, just like any other page. If you link to a page, if the user can get to it by following a link and see its content, then so can a search engine, no problem. It doesn't matter whether it is .asp .php .html or .monkey - if the page has a link to it, search engines do not know or care how it was made, they just suck it up.
How much they like your url is an entirely, and I mean entirely, different issue - so they probably won't like or rank a page called http://www.example.com/w9845709345/pwoeih88/9845-2r45.html as much as one called http://www.example.com/widget-type/widget-details.asp
But it has NOTHING to do with the extension, or the fact that the content was fed in from a database. Nothing at all. As so many have already said.
This isn't opinion. It isn't a matter of opinion. It's fact.
Yes, it's very possible to get a dynamic site to index well in the search engines. However, it nearly defeats the purpose of having a dyanic, database-driven site, because you have to put so much work into changing page names and variable names to match the content of your pages. I'm working on a system right now that will do that better and faster.
However, Karlos is 100% accurate when he says that SEs, especially Google, are much more apt to FIND, follow and index an HTML page than a .asp, .php, .jsp or other dynamic page, NOT BECAUSE they are dynamic (yes, they parse plain HTML), but because of what they need to pull data (variables attached to the URL to tell the database what to pull).
Like I said, to build a dynamic site to be just as SE-friendly as a static html site, you would have to put so much work in, you might as well just have built it in HTML. What would be the point? That is, until I finish my new content management system! ;-)
Like I said, to build a dynamic site to be just as SE-friendly as a static html site, you would have to put so much work in, you might as well just have built it in HTML.
Nonsense. It is a simple matter to have URLs written without queries in them and requires no work at all. You are almost certainly on dynamic sites that do this every day, probably the majority of such sites do.
