Tuesday, August 29, 2006

The IIS equivalent of mod rewrite.

Most websites out there today contain at least some dynamic content. This great but unfortunately search engines do not always like indexing dynamic content. Some search engines will not index a page that contains ? or = or & in the URL. Well thats where LinkFreeze comes in. Linkfreeze from Helicon Tech, is a nice little utility that can be installed on IIS. It adds another tab to the properties dialog for each website in IIS, that allows you to specify how to replace characters and file extensions in a URL. for instance lets say the URL to a page on your site looks like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/mypage.cfm?articleid=3&category=7

well because of the ?, = and & characters in the URL, search engines may not index the page properly. so after applying linkfreeze to the URL, you could make the URL look something like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/mypace-articleid-3-category-7.htm

the user could go to either the old style URL or the new modified URL and still arrive at the correct page, and search engines will see it as static content.

it works because IIS gets the actual URL, and sends that to your application server (coldfusion, php, asp...) for processing, and after receiving the results from the application server but before displaying the results to the page, LinkFreeze will translate the URL into the new format so it appears as though its static.

At least thats how i understand it. Thats pretty slick if you ask me.

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