ASP.NET: Url-Rewriting In Migrated Website
Wow, it
was January since my last post! sorry guys I'm was very busy coding, monitoring
our house' dev't in province, preparing my relocation and some business matters.
Anyway, a fellow filipino developer at msforums.ph raised the question if
its true that URl-Rewriting "damage" page hits and page rank. Speaking from my
experience here's my take.
Why do we need to implement ur-rewriting?
Well aside from aesthetic value,
there quite a number of benefits implementing is. Read it drectly
from SEO Expert's.
When Url-Rewriting Goes Wrong?
The problem I can see witn URL
Re-writing is when you use this without care into a newly migrated or existing
website which has considerable good page ranks. Implementing url rewriting can
cause the search engine confused on which page to look for a particular keyword
from your site. For instance, the original website you upgraded into ASP.NET has
the page http://www.mystore.ph/products.php?product_id=1001
whch shows a Philips Flourescent Lights. This page maintains top rank in the
search engine index. Apparently, you would like to migrate the site and
implement url-rewriting into your product pages and convert the said page into
http://www.mystore.ph/products/phiilips-flourescent-lamps.aspx.
This is really cool and surely add your philips products in to the search index,
but... you forgot to mark old page as non-existent and there's new page for the
product. This is the problem! You now lost your position and the new site grows
older and older.
A way to fix this problem is to issue a permanent
redirection (aka. Error 301) when those old pages was requested. Why? When you
upgraded your website and you removed those old pages, new pages will not appear
in the search results right away, it will take some time before the cache gets
refreshed. To test, you use http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com,
you will see old pages are returned and not the new web pages are not yet
indexed after the upgrade. When users searched or redirected into your new
website' old pages, user will be lost and Error 404 will be issued whicn in turn
puts your website in bad fate in page rank.
Since I implemented URL re-writing in one of our stores, it became #1 and
maintain its position on www.google.dk search index. The engine is also doing
good indexing our pages.
Reference:
Error
301 : Permanent Redirection Tutorial