Is yummy SEO site architecture even possible with ASP.NET?
-
Beloved community:
I'm about to optimize a reasonably large website that has been developed with ASP.NET. My crawl diagnostics do not paint a pretty picture: overly dynamic URLs, loads of duplicate content, and 302 temporary redirects.
I found a helpful IIS extension on Scott Guthrie's blog that eliminates a lot of of the above issues.
But looking ahead, I need a solution for creating a "category" organized, flat site architecture.
What steps should I take with my development team in order to implement a site architecture that is highly-crawlable and user-friendly?
Any ASP.NET gurus out there?
Thanks in advance!
-
If you are already looking at a site rework under aspnet the have a look at incorperating this with MVC which offers a much more structured approach and allows handling of redirects 301 and produces much faster loading pages without all the cookie state stuffing of straight aspnet. It also handles security much better with attributes to control protocol and access rights.
-
Thanks, Josh- I will.
Stephanie
-
Stephanie,
My pleasure. Feel free to PM me if anything comes up--I'm probably dealing with similar issues.
-
Thank you, Josh- that makes me feel so much better and sounds like great advice. Thank you for the reply.
Stephanie
-
Hi Stephanie,
The more I work with ASP.NET the less scared I am about its SEO implications. Be encouraged that you are building the site from the ground up, rather than optimizing an existing site.
The biggest thing to look out for is duplicate content. Make sure your developers are building pages that are unique and worthy of Google's crawl.
Also, if you plan on having user reviews enabled for your products, it may be helpful to set one product page as rel=canonical, so that you aren't confusing the SEs with lots of similar pages.
Example:
You have a page for blue widgets. Users can review the blue widget, but each new review becomes a new page. Since all the pages are about blue widgets, and share the same image content and product description, you want to canonicalize the original product page so it gets indexed.
Before you pay the final balance to your dev team, crawl the site with SEOMoz tools. If there is anything substantial, you can point it out to the developers.
Good luck!
-
You guys are really scaring me. I just hired a development company to build an ecommerce site on aspdotnetstorefront. I chose asp.net because the site will eventually integrate with a microsoft/.net inventory management and order processing system.
What is it that I need to look out for? I was told that having .aspx at the end of my urls was no bid deal. If the site is planned well (flat architecture, etc.) what exactly is the problem? I just have not been able to understand.
Thank you!
Stephanie
-
Guillaume,
Fantastic response. Thanks for highlighting out those two resources on SEO Moz. You are right to point out that "ASP.net" is just a server side language, and that the code itself never makes it to the web browser. The struggle is that 'ASP.net' has a tendency to render html in a non SEO-friendly manner compared to PHP or other development platforms.
I know the diagrams from your links will be a helpful illustration for the dev team as we proceed with our site optimization.
-
Hi Josh,
I don't think this question has anything to do about ASP.net itself. Crawlers look at the rendered html code, not the server side script, so no matter what language was used to code the website server side, you should look at the client side.
There are numerous ressources on SEOMoz that will guide you in making your website architecture "yummy". You might want to look into these, but there are others (use the search feature like I did) :
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/site-architecture-for-seo
When it comes to linking, be sure to stay consistant with the way you link to your internal pages. Use Google Webmaster Tool and Bing Webmaster Center to manage URL parameters, use rel="canonical" tags and 301 redirects when needed.
I hope these links will help you,
Guillaume Voyer. -
Thanks for this link, David. It pointed me to a couple of potentially useful URL rewrite extensions. However, the bigger issue for me is still the sitemap. Any recommendations on how to get a flatter, more organized structure?
-
unfortunately, this is not an option.
-
I agree with this! If not possible, use my link!
-
ditch asp.net ? port it to a more useful platform.
-
http://weblogs.asp.net/gunnarpeipman/archive/2008/06/10/basic-asp-net-seo.aspx
Try that for starters.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site?
Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jnew9290 -
SEO Concerns From Moving Mobile M Dot site to Responsive Version?
I currently have my mobile site set up as a m dot site. I have designed a new responsive/adaptive version of my desktop site I would like to start using. When I search from google on mobile, my website is indexed as the m dot site. When I make the switch, this will no longer be the case as I will only have one url for both mobile and desktop. The m dot url's will no longer work. Are there any SEO consequences from making this shift?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mikeylong70 -
My site is always in the top 4 on google, and sometimes goes to #2\. But the site at #1 is always at #1 .. how can i beat them?
So i'm sure this is a very generic question.. of course everyone wants to be #1. We are an ecommerce web site. We have all sorts of products, user ratings, and are loved by our customers. We sell over 3 million a year. So let me give you some data.. First of all one of the sites that keeps taking the #2 or #3 spot is amazons category for what we sell.. (i'm not sure if I should say who we are here.. as I don't want the #1 spot to realize we are trying to take them over!) Amazon of course has a domain authority of 100. But they never take the #1 spot. The other site that takes the #2 and #3 spot is not even selling anything. Happens to be a technical term's with the same name wikipedia page! (i wish google would figure out people aren't looking for that!) Anyways.. every day we bouce back and forth between #4 and #2.. but #1 never changes.. Here are the stats of us verse #1 from moz: #1: Page Authority: 56.8, Root Domains Linking to page: 158, Domain Authority: 54.6: root domains linking to the root domain 1.42k my site: Page Authority: 60.6, Root domains linking to the page: 562, Domain Authority: 52.8: root domains linking to the root domain: 1.03k So they beat us in domain authority SLIGHTLY and in root domains linking to the root domain. So SEO masters.. what do I do to fix this? Get better backlinks? But how.... I can't just email GQ and ask them to write about us can I? I'm open to all things.. Maybe i'm not using moz data correctly.. We should at least be #2. We get #2 every other day.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 88mph0 -
Site not progressing at all....
We relaunched our site almost a year ago after our old site dropped out of ranking due to what we think was overused anchor text.... We transferred over the content to the new site, but started fresh in terms of links etc. And did not redirect the old site. Since the launch we have focused on producing good content and social, but the site has made no progress at all. The only factor I can think off is that one site linked to us from all of their pages, which we asked them to remove which they did over 3 months ago, but still showing in Webmaster tools.... Any help would be appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
Multi-Location SEO: Sites vs Pages
I just started with a new company that requires multi-location SEO for its niche product/service. Currently, we have a main corporate website, as well as, 40+ individual dealer websites (we host all). Keep in mind each of these dealers consist of only 1-2 people, so corporate I will be managing the site or sites and content strategy. Many of the individual dealer sites actually rank very well (#1-#3) in their areas for our targeted keywords, but they all use the same duplicate content. Also, there are many dealer sites that have dropped off the radar in last year, which is probably because of the duplicate and static content. So I'm at a crossroads... Attempt to redo all of these location sites with unique and local content for each or Create optimized unique pages for each of them on our main site and redirect their current local domains to their page on our site Any advise regarding which direction to go in and why. Why is very important. It will be very difficult to convince a dealer that is #1 with his local site that we are redirecting to our main site, so I need some good ammo and reasoning. Also, any tips toward achieving local seo success will be greatly appreciated, too! Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-coopersmith0 -
Why does this site rank above us?
We own www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk and over the last 8 months have built some decent guest post, charity and customer links but still we seem to be beaten on good words such as banners, banner, vinyl banner, pvc banner etc by this website www-signfirm.com we just cannot figure out how this is happening and would be very grateful if someone with great wisdom could give us an in-site into why this is happening and we would be very grateful..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
SEO for a plumber?
Hello, How does a small, local business win at SEO (without abusing directories, articles, and paid links)? It seems that everyone is saying "create unique content", but that just doesn't seem realistic for a small plumber in a big metro area. One might suggest coming up with helpful articles about plumbing tips, etc., but there are thousands of spun articles on article directories already. On page optimization is in place, we are listed in the main directories, we've asked the people we know to link to us, and we are engaged in social media. What would you recommend next? Thanks, Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WillWatrous0 -
How do you prevent the mobile site becoming a duplicate of the full browser site?
We have a larger site with 100k+ pages, we need to create a mobile site which gets indexed in the mobile engines but I am afraid that google bot will consider these pages duplicates of the normal site pages. I know I can block it on the robots.txt but I still need it to be indexed for mobile search engines and I think google has a mobile crawler as well. Feel free to give me any other tips that I should follow while trying to optimize the mobile version. Any help would be appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo0