I have an app on ASP.NET MVC 3 and I am using routing to handle my requests as you guess. But I have seen some websites that are putting .html extensions after on their URLs. I could do the same with my app and tell the IIS to render html as an asp.net page.
I am wondering if there is any SEO or some other advantage to do that?
According to this article from the official Google Blog the important thing isn't how they look, but how they work. It's a long article with a lot of interesting stuff which could offer you some knowledge on how to create your URL's.
Historically, people thought that dynamic pages did not perform in search engines as well as static ones.
This is largely nonsense in general, so it's purely an aesthetic thing. The more elements/keywords in a URL the worse it probably is although it is negligible.
Related
I'm experimenting with using MVC routing as a temporary fix to get SEO friendly urls on an old (VB6/ASP classic) system while it's being re-written (which will take a long time).
The old system has 1 asp file with a vb6 dll that generates html which is served by a response.write in the master.asp.
so urls on that system look like this:
www.foo.com/master.asp?sessionid=abc123&pagetype=Item&ItemID=My-widget
I'm wondering if I can use an MVC project to create a route for cleaner urls
and have a controller map the values and build the corresponding old url and then do a Server.Transfer to it.
So the new url would look like:
www.foo.com/Item/My-widget
and map to the old url at
www.foo.com/master.asp?sessionid=abc123&pagetype=Item&ItemID=My-widget
both could then be used interchangeably so the existing site doesn;t have to change, but I could use the new cleaner url on external sites for better SEO
Is this possible?
Is there another way to do this?
edit:
since it's not possible to use server.transfer from MVC, I'm now considering using routing in an ASP.net webforms app.
This should allow me to get the routing part of the application done. Will post back here once I've tried it.
I would suggest you use UrlRewriter.net library instead. It has a lot more features than the the built-in Routing framework (including Regex support), support for permanent redirects, and it's all configurable in the web.config file.
I've tried to use Routing before for this sort of thing but found that it became quite limiting very quickly.
http://urlrewriter.net/
Edit: you will still need a .net web project "wrapper" for your classic asp solution though, as you describe in your question, which of course comes with it's own problems as outlined in the other answers.
I cant think of a way that you could do this, but you might have some luck with the url rewriter module in iis: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/460/using-the-url-rewrite-module/
I think this could be made to work, but it doesn't sound ideal. I suspect you'd run into some issues with sharing data between the two sessions too. It may be a good idea IF you are planning to migrate to .net, and the app will be running in a "half and half" state for a while (if so I'd suggest introducing a managed core library shared between both sides before worrying about url rewrites).
I haven't done much work with classic ASP lately, but I think this post on URL Rewriting in Classic ASP might be helpful to you.
I've seen a lot of dynamic website through the internet that their pages are in html or htm format . I don't get it why is that ? And how they do that ?
Just look at this website : http://www.realmadrid.com/cs/Satellite/en/Home.htm
What you see in the URL can be set at will by the people running the web site. The technique is called URL rewriting.
How
On Apache, the most popular solution to that is the mod_rewrite module.
Seeing as you've tagged ASP.NET: As far as I know, ASP.NET has only limited rewriting support out of the box. This blog entry promises a complete URL rewriting solution in ASP 2.0
Why
As for the why, there is no compelling technical reason to do this.
It's just that htm and html are the recognized standard extensions for HTML content, and many (including myself) think they simply look nicer than .php, .php5, .asp, .aspx and so on.
Also, as Adam Pope points out in his answer, this makes it less obvious which server side technology/language is used.
The .html/.htm extension has the additional effect that if you save it to disk, it is usually automatically connected with your installed browser.
Maybe (a very big maybe) there are very stupid simple client programs around that recognize that they have to parse HTML by looking at the extension. But that would be a blatant violation of rules and was hopefully last seen in 1994. Anyway, I don't think this is the case any more.
There are a number of potential reasons, these may include:
They could be trying to hide the technology they built the site with
They could be serving a cached version of a page which was written out to HTML.
They could simply perceive it to look friendlier to the user
They might be using a server-side scripting language like PHP or ASP. You can configure what file extensions get parsed by the language by editing the web server configuration files.
For example in PHP the default extension is .php but you could configure the server to use .html, that would mean any files with the .html extension could contain PHP code they would get parsed before the page is sent to the clients web browser.
This is generally not recommend as it adds an overhead and .html pages that don't have any PHP would be parsed by the PHP engine anyway which is slower then serving pages direct to the browser.
The other way would be to use some form of URL rewriting. See URL Rewriting in ASP.NET
Another reason is SEO(Search engine optimization). Many search engines like html pages and many guys（I mean some SEO specialists) think the html can improve the rank of their content in search engine.
One possibility is just historical reasons. Pages that started static, now are generated dynamically, but sites don't want to break old customer's favorites.
They keep some pages as html because their content is not supposed to change frequently or not at all.
But you should also keep in mind the fact that some sites are dynamic but they change the page extention to html but original page remains same eg php or aspx, etc using htaccess or some frameworks like codeigniter etc.
So, I know there's a lot of this subject here and over the Internet. But most articles/questions refers to "static" url rewriting, like:
www.site.com/products.aspx?category=Books
So they rewrite it to
www.site.com/Products/Books
That's ok but I need something else.
The site is like a CMS, it has different types of content.
Nowadays to read the article titled "How StackOverflow helps you in your development" you need to go to an URL like the following.
www.site.com/viewContent.aspx?Id=1234
What I want to achive is:
www.site.com/Content/Articles/how-to-stackoverflow-helps-you-in-your-development
So as I understand, I need to involve ASP .NET in that, because first I need to retrieve the article (an its title of course) and then rewrite the URL.
But I'm wondering how the hell ASP .NET will know how to get that article if I go to that URL, it doesn't include the id anywhere...
So maybe I could accept something like
www.site.com/Content/Articles/1234/how-to-stackoverflow-helps-you-in-your-development
I'm kind of lost here really.. I've never done any URL Rewriting at all and I've googled a lot and I cannot find a way to do what I want. Maybe what I want is not called url rewriting??? I don't know...
The site is running under Windows 2003 Server, IIS6, ASP .NET 3.5 SP1
And of course, I need a free solution, cannot spend 100usd on the ISAPI mod (besides I don't know if that is going to do what I need).
Thanks to all and sorry if this is a duplicated question, but I couldn't find it.
EDIT: I don't need to support non-ASP.NET files (jpgs, gifs, etc) don't need to be rewritten. I just need to rewrite the viewContent page to include the content title into the URL.
You can use the new Routing that comes with ASP.Net 3.5 sp1 to have clean URLs.
This can even be done in web forms and not just MVC. ( I have done it myself). See here and here for exanples of how to set it up.
You can throw the Id of the article and the title in the URL and make the Id the real parameter that gets used to search for the article. That is what SO does. Try removing the question for the URL and it will take you to the same place.
Even if you don't use the Id you can pass the title of the article "how-to-stackoverflow-helps-you-in-your-development" to your DB and retreive the article based on the title.
With regards to IIS 6 it is a little trickier since IIS 6 by default can't handle extension-less URL's.
There are a few work arounds:
Use the wildcard mapping in IIS to map all requests to Asp.Net
Put Default.aspx at the end of your urls
See this post for other possible solutions.
Although the first solution may have performance issues if all content in your site goes through Asp.Net (even images, css, .html ...) in a small site it shouldn't matter. I have used this approach and there wasn't any major performance issues. I think it is the simplest solution. Here is the website I built with it
I hope this helps.
This one is free, I have used it and it works pretty well: http://www.codeplex.com/IIRF
The nice thing is that it will handle url's without an extension (i.e. .aspx, .html, etc.)
You can achieve this with ASP.NET routing.You can do this with ASP.NET MVC as well as Webforms.No need to do anything with IIS.
Check the below link
https://web.archive.org/web/20201205221404/https://www.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/051309-1.aspx#postadlink
I did URL routing in my web application within 1 hour with the details from the above link.Its quite simple to learn .They provide sample codes too.It will help you to do it easily
You can retrieve the Id of the content using the title.But title should be unique.You can use ajax to check whether the title is a already existing one when user takes mouse out from the textbox.
Easiest way is to add a http module to your current webforms project.
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/02/26/tip-trick-url-rewriting-with-asp-net.aspx
This shows you the basics of it, But it can easily be expanded so that the pages you want to rewite is taken from a database or even built on the fly.
ASP.net MVC is your friend for that
stackoverflow use MVC
A customer is asking if there is anything we can do to remove "/Pages" from his Internet-facing MOSS publishing site. Some Googling reveals that some clever use of HTTPModules may be able to hide the presence of Pages, but I've yet to see an end-to-end working solution. Have any of you come up against this particular requirement, and if so, how did you resolve it?
The customer's main concern with /Pages is the SEO impact of it - if anyone has any way to mitigate those issues or can explain why having this extra level in your URL would not be a concern, that would be appreciated as well (and probably better, in the long run!)
Check out this posting. http://blog.mastykarz.nl/semantic-urls-in-moss-2007-imtech-sharepoint-semantic-urls-free-feature/
The main issue you'll have is that Microsoft won't provide support for a SharePoint instance that has "hidden" the pages library.
Yes, you can use a URL re-writer to exclude the /pages section of the path, and you will also need to perform a search and replace on the response stream to strip it out of all generated URLS - this will obviously have a performance hit on the server - but with careful use of caching, it might not be that noticable.
PSS will require you to remove the setup before they will investigate any issues with your site, so you (or your client) will need to weigh up the perceived benefits with the performance and support issues.
I believe we've done it for one of our clients in the past, but most are happy to stick with the /pages element - it really doesn't have that much effect.
I know ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 has the URL routing engine that ASP.NET MVC uses built in. If you wanted to run against that version of the .NET framework, you could use routes to eliminate the /Pages part of the URL. But I'm not positive about running MOSS on that version of .NET. That's the first place I'd check, though.
You can get a list of public facing websites using MOSS here. You can see they use the "page" libraries and you can check your favorite search engines against the content.
Hopefully this will be enough to demonstrate that the "Page" libraries aren't going to be too much of an issue and you can save them a bunch of cash.
You can change the name (and the url) of the /Pages library.
Are there any tools that will spider an asp.net website and create a static site?
http://www.httrack.com/
Have used for this purpose a few times, may need to do a little tidying up of urls, and some css linked images might not make it, depends on how good a job you want to do.
If you have dreamweaver, you can use that to manage the links if you need to clean up the file names afterwards.
Optionally use the link checker extension for firefox to check it all afterwards.
You could use OfflineExplorer: http://www.metaproducts.com/mp/Offline_Explorer.htm
This works well as long as you only have GET requests (links). Postbacks will not
be executed.
Be aware that crawling your site might acually change the underlying
database so I would strongly recommend you back up the database and web before
using a crawler.
Another solution is wget.
I've had good luck with WebZip.