Is asp(x) being penalised?

**HairyCornflake** · 01-02-07

This thread will probably appear absurd to the majority of ppl who visit this board. However, the question is "Is there any prejudice against Microsoft products by the Big G*? The extension in the url is a give away and, is it a disadvantage?

Around 1 year ago I downloaded Visual Web Developer and adopted to VWD from DreamWeaver. I have a background in Programming and believed this was a good route to take. Some of my websites are data driven (with the exception of a few). However, I have noticed a decrease in traffic (with the exception to the 1st 2 weeks of this year) in traffic and I cannot explain the reason why this has occurred.

Yes, I've studied, tags, links, sandbox etcetc

Is there anything stopping G from ranking asp(x) sites lower than, say, php, html etc? Who can confirm that it's a level playing field?

**Ste** · 01-02-07

I would not have thought so – but who knows – its the same with the old Yahoo wont index me cos I have adsense on my pages etc.

**jonsp** · 01-02-07

Are you rewriting your urls so as not to use querystrings? If not this would be a big help and is easy enough to do in asp.net. Also you can have IIS parse .htm pages as asp.net so G would never know what you're using.

Jon

**IntervisionMedia** · 01-02-07

You need to have SEO in mind when developing with ASP.NET, don't use lots of postbacks and labels etc, stick to literal and repeater. And make sure the spiders can crawl your website without having to submit form posts etc..

As jonsp mentioned, you should try and rewrite your URL's, this can be implemented by yourself using HttpHandlers or if you have a server, or shared, you need to have ISAPI_Rewrite installed, which is IIS's equivalent to mod_rewrite for apache. This enables you to have urls like domain.com/article/my-article-title/ instead of domain.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=501

Hope that helps.
Matthew

**jonsp** · 01-02-07

Should have said also make sure you have enableviewstate=false on your controls as G doesn't like the viewstate code that asp.net spits out.

Jon

**HairyCornflake** · 01-02-07

Originally Posted by IntervisionMedia

As jonsp mentioned, you should try and rewrite your URL's, this can be implemented by yourself using HttpHandlers or if you have a server, or shared, you need to have ISAPI_Rewrite installed, which is IIS's equivalent to mod_rewrite for apache. This enables you to have urls like domain.com/article/my-article-title/ instead of domain.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=501

Thanks,

my latest attempt was originally going to use your example of '?ID=3333" etc. However, after a little research I discovered that, using your 404 page you can create fab urls with 'tariffs/o2/o2-150' etc that are dynamically created which I believe will help with SEO (in addition to a million other things of course).

**GerryW** · 11-02-07

404 - would that have a server response of 404 ? In which case Google will NOT index these pages, you can as someone else mentioned use server-re-writing without it presenting a 404 (there are check header scripts available), 301 or 302 redirects are ok - but 404s will probably have a detrimental effect on your entire site!

Gerry

**HairyCornflake** · 11-02-07

Cheers for that,

however, I've checked numerous dynamic urls at the site below and all report:
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK

http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp

The dynamic url stays in the address bar.

So, G won't see this as a redirec-will it? Cos if it does I'm up the creek....