ASP.net

[ruben]

I want to make a new site with ASP.net technology and i ask me if this tech is search engine friendly.

What things i have to take care?

tx in advance

[dvduval]

asp.net is pretty untested. One of the larger sites using it is Home Shopping Network and the pagerank of their internal pages is pretty bad. I think the main things to consider are:
1) URL length
2) too many &'s and ='s

[ruben]

Well i test some websites and the url's there no longer. The url i saw were like that:

http://www.domain.com/home.aspx?id=1 (for one section)

If you are crawling inside the site the only thing that changes is the id, i mean you could have the id from 1 to xxx (number). I don't thing it coulb be more longer.

You could have all aspx in main directory, but i don't know how google take this aspx

[JuniorHarris]

Search engines can/only index that which is returned in the HTML stream. So, that which is delivered to the browser/user will determine the effectiveness of any web technology [implementation].

[dsearchguy]

I'm an old asp guy, working with jsp , java now.

I'm slowly learning asp.net on my own time.

From what I know, in the end, it is all html. The server transforms the server side code into html for the browser to read ...

It shouldn't be a problem, and if someone has had a problem, it would be interesting to hear about.

....
d

[UkWebapprentice]

Hi I code in asp.net as well. It shouldn't really be a problem.

check out www.asp.net that's an asp.net site and it seems to be indexed o.k by google.

John

[ruben]

I just view one thing that i'm worry about.

If i make this search in GGL :

http://www.google.com/search?hl=es&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=allinurl%3Aaspx&lr=

And i follow all the results, I look that every aspx isn't ranked for google toolbar, do you know if this is a toolbar problem, or GGL cannot index any aspx?

[JuniorHarris]

I see the same thing...

If the pages are in the index, then it appears they have been indexed....I would guess an issue with the Toolbar?!?

I found the same thing with these on Google (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=site%3Acatalog.us.dell.com+dell.com)

[french dread]

Same thing for me, I have a grey PR bar since the website changed from asp to aspx (even with 96 quality links)

[ruben]

I wrote yesterday to google and i have a reply, i'll post it in Google forum

[UkWebapprentice]

Hi all,

Thought I would continue this thread a bit.

At the moment I have an asp.net app that generates static html pages which is doing well in the search engines.

In order to take advantage of some of the features of asp.net though I am thinking about creating a http handler that takes a url www.something.com/handler/pt/portalname/tb/tabid/ti/tabindex/keyword/default.aspx

and translates it to handler/default.aspx?pt=portalname&tb=2&ti=1

Now I have three questions:

1) If I use a httphandler I can do two things with this url:

//transfer the request to the real url

application.Context.RewritePath(url);

or

// keep the original url and just process the url on the server and return the results.

application.Server.Transfer(url);

If I use context re-write path will google see this as a redirect and potentially spam?


2) I know the letter from google said aspx pages are indexed but for seo purposes would it be better to keep on generating html pages or use asp.net's cache instead (So I dont have to continuously hit the db server)?

3) The default.aspx page on one of my sites detects the browser (Desktop browser or mobile browser) and redirects it to one page if someone is using a mobile phone and a different phone if they are using a desktop browser.

Would this affect my ranking? Is it best to just remove this script and tell mobile users to visit a particular directory e.g. domain.com/mobile/?

Thanks for your feedback people.

John

[JuniorHarris]

Just a quick post to your question.

Remember search engines can/only index that which is returned to the browser/user. Anything which happens server-side is not "detected" by the engine, so if the URL does not change for the user, then it does not "change" for the spider. The only problem is when using redirects which cause an extra response to the client.

The choice to use aspx or html file types are best left up to you. You know your environment best and what your plans and goals are for moving the site forward. I use ASP and XML on the server side, but all the documents are HTML extensions. The application may leverage several technologies, but they all produce/return only HTML. Of course all this was developed before any of the engines really started addressing "complex" URLs.

By design my pages can hit the database for each page, but I've also implemented a page cache feature as well where the generated output is saved, then subsequent requests simply check/issue a Server.Transfer to the appropriate page. So you really can have the best of both worlds!

As for desktop/mobile browser detection, I think you should be ok. I would imagine most of the spiders would fall under the desktop browser category. This is simply a guess, and maybe there are some others who can offer their 2¢.

[KeyWord]

JR,

I've been using a custom error page to send back pages in .html format.

One downside is that my server stats now show this custom error page instead of the nicer url. This makes looking at stats tough because a lot of my dynamic pages are all lumped to the custom error page.

Do you have this problem?

How do you get around this?

Thanks !

[polarmate]

You will probably have to write your own logfiles or pre-process your logfiles before sending them to the log analyzers, Keyword.

Try this thread from this post on (see 'sidenote' in this post and follow through to the last post on that page)
http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10173&perpage=20&pagenumber=3#post106733

[JuniorHarris]

Stats is one of the biggest issues using a 404 handler, and I actually implemented our own custom stats.

See the thread polarmate posted...there is some great information in there...if you still have questions post again and well do the best to help you find a solution.