Search Engine Friendly URLs

[Big Daddy Turbo]

Hello there

A client of mine has employed an SEO company to aid with her search engine rankings. This SEO company have stresed the importance of search engine friendly URL's to my client who has asked me to update the site accordingly.

I'm not sure of the best way to achieve this as the site is database driven and I am using Windows servers.

I was wondering if anyone had any knowledge of this. I predict a lot of rewriting but I thought I'd ask.

Any advise or pointers would be appreciated

Cheers in advance, Andi

[WhiskyFudge]

I'm not any where near as up on SEO as I should be, but in today's world I would hope and imagine that most of the myths about search engines and url's are now false. The only advantage as far as I can see is it's a chance to put throw more keywords at the search engine.

As IIS has no native support for such things (as far as I know) and Catalyst2 does not have any suitable add-in's. Therefore how you rewrite url's is depends on which ever technology you used to develop your site with.

HTH

Jas

[Big Daddy Turbo]

Hi Mr Fudge

The site is written in classic asp so I suppose a rewrite is on the cards

With regards to SEO I completely agree with you. It does seem a bit backward that people on Windows servers who can't use an Apache mod_rewrite should be penalised for having query strings in their URL's.

I'm sure that these issues will get sorted out. From what I'm led to believe it wasn't that long ago where if a URL had any query data in it at all it was completely ignored

[BlackWasp]

One of the issues with having querystring parameters is that some search engines (read Google) don't necessarily follow every link when they visit. This is a stated policy of Google as they have had issues with data-driven sites being overwhelmed by the indexing robots. This is overcome by using URL rewriting. You do need to make sure though that you then do not succumb to the stated problem. You can adjust your robots.txt to avoid this by adding a crawl delay that, hopefully, the robots will honour.

A site I found, http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/search-engine/robots-txt.asp, lets you build a robots.txt including the crawl delay.

[BlackWasp]

I have also found a forum where somebody explains how to rewrite URLs in classic ASP.

http://forums.aspfree.com/code-bank-...is-102550.html