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 posible to improve site rankings working only with an other site?
Hi everyone, i´ll try to explain a situation is happening to me, i´m goint to try to explain the case (im writing the sites without links for explication purposes. Site 1: Adventurerooms Site 2: Adventureroomsmallorca Site 3: Adventureroomsmadrid (the new site) What happen is that at first there was only Adventurerooms and Adventureroomsmallorca, Adventurerooms was for Madrid and linked to the one in Mallorca too, was kind of giving the information for Madrid but in first page split with a link to Mallorca. In a new strategy we create Adventureroomsmadrid for Madrid, and leave Adventurerooms for Spain (with links to Adventureroomsmadrid and Adventureroomsmallorca. We redirect the info for Madrid in Adventurerooms to Adventureroomsmadrid with 301 redirections. We work during this 3 months in Adventureroomsmadrid making content in the blog, and improving (now Adventureroomsmadrid is Moz 15 (perhaps even more), and Adventurerooms is Moz 10. Surprising Adventurerooms is getting better in its search rankings, even when we took away content from it and even without working well. Adventureroomsmadrid is also improving but not as much as Adventurerooms (i know that is a new site, only 3 months), but Adventurerooms gets better results with no content and only DA of 10. I hope i´ve explain the case with my english so the question is: "Is it posible to improve site rankings working only with an other site?" Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webtematica0 -
SEO page descriptions on mobile - how to hide while preserving the juice for SEO?
Hi everybody, On our pages we have crafted good text paragraphs for SEO purposes. On desktop everything is fine but on mobile the paragraph of text pushes the main content really low on the page. Is there a way of hiding the text while preserving the SEO juices and not getting penalised by Google for spamming techniques? I'd appreciate any recommendations on how to deal with this. Thanks very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Firebox0 -
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 -
Merging 11 community sites into 1 regional site
I am merging 11 real estate community sites into 1 regional site and don't really know what type of redirect should I use for the homepage?, for instance: www.homepage.com redirect to www.regionalsite.com/community-page Should I 301 this redirect? If yes, how could I 301 redirect a homepage to an internal page in my new site? Cheers 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mbulox0 -
Moving from a static HTML CSS site with .html files to a Wordpress Site while keeping link structure
Mozzers, Hope this finds you well. I need some advice. We have a site built with a dreamweaver template, and it is lacking in responsiveness, ease of updates, and a lot of the coding is behind traditional web standards (which I know will start to hurt our rank - if not the user experience). For SEO purposes, we would like to move the existing static based site to Wordpress so we can update it easily and keep content fresh. Our current site, thriveboston.com, has a lot of page extensions ending in .html. For the transition, it is extremely important for us to keep the link structure. We rank well in the SERPs for Boston Counseling, etc... I found and tested a plugin (offline) that can add a .html extension to Wordpress pages, which allows us to keep our current structure, but has anyone had any luck with this live? Has anyone had any luck moving from a static site - to a Wordpress site - while keeping the current link structure - without hurting any rank? We hope to move soon because if the site continues to grow, it will become even harder to migrate the site over. Also, does anyone have any hesitations? It this a bad move? Should we just stay on the current DWT template (the HTML and CSS) and not migrate? Any suggestions and advice will be heeded. Thanks Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _Thriveworks0 -
Is this Negative SEO?
Hello Everyone, I have just spent the past 9 months designing, engineering, and manufacturing our first product. We just opened our web store and started selling product. http://miveu.com. I have spent zero time doing any kind of SEO. We haven't even put up a sitemap yet or any redirects. I'm just now starting to take a look at things. As soon as I start digging, I find that it appears that someone is at least attempting to do some kind of negative SEO against us. It seems to have started about a month ago. Check this out. https://www.google.com/search?q=miveu&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-beta#q=miveu&hl=en&client=firefox-beta&hs=bo2&tbo=1&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvns&source=lnt&tbs=qdr:d&sa=X&psj=1&ei=AGgBUJfJNK650QHW8YW-Bw&ved=0CE0QpwUoAg&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=335379d2f3ac2208&biw=993&bih=637 At first I was thinking this isn't so good, but it seems they are just trying to build crap content about our keywords and make it relevant to us. After taking a closer look, I'm thinking maybe this isn't all bad. They have targeted all of our exiting YouTube videos and created new videos that use all of our keywords, titles, people, etc in an effort to make our existing videos irrelevant. They have have also done the same thing with articles that were written about us, awards we have won as well as started negative campaigns about us and people who have said good things about us. Here are my thoughts. While the content is really crappy, it seems like they are actually building keyword relevance to us and our products. They have all the right keywords, the content is just crappy. "There is no such thing as bad press". I don't know if anyone has ever said this before, but I'm going to refer to their effort as "White-Hate SEO" because it doesn't appear to be a real dark effort. Am I missing something here, am I way off base? My bigger worry is that their campaign may include some much darker efforts that I just haven't found yet. I'm pretty sure I know who is responsible for this. They have made it clear that they really do hate us. Frankly, I'm not interested in retaliation, I just want to get my own house in order with some good old-school whit-hat SEO. I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dmac
David0 -
What is wrong with my site?
I could use suggestions/input. My site is consistently being beaten by doorway pages with zero to no content. In fact, on the keyword "lawrenceville plumber" I am being beaten by a KID with a blank wordpress installation. I really need help determining what my issues are and what I can do to help. According to all of the graders, ranks, etc my site is great. I have written tons of unique content, have added a blog unique articles and self-helps. Please help! My site is www.akinsplumbing.net. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chuckakins0 -
Seo for Q&A site
Hi, I am working on a newly launched Q&A site. We have very few questions and users right now and very very low seo traffic. In order to increase the number of users and seo traffic we intend to create a number of pages containing potential questions. Each page would have the following structure: Question. Ex: "What are the top wholesale suppliers of coffee in China?" Some content. Ex: Are you looking for wholesale suppliers of coffee in China? Post your question here? Question form Some additional content So there would be a page for wholesale suppliers of coffee for every country. We would publish the pages gradually and the content would be unique but yet similar (ex: only the Country changes). What do you think about this approach? Is it a good idea or can it be dangerous? We don't want to incur in any kind of penalization, we just want to give the possibility to people who are looking for specific information to find us and be able to post the request on our website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ypsilon0