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Search Engine Optimization
I received an email this morning asking about the heavy use of querystrings to drive the display of content and how that affects search engine indexing. This is something I haven't give a lot of thought, but decided it needs attention.

Knowing that Google does index dynamic sites, I did a site search to see what sort of things showed up. I found links using every querystring value except archive=xxx. This got me thinking about some alternatives.

The first is to modify the content engine so that so that when entryid, daystodisplay, categoryid, and archive are all null, all entries for a blog are returned. This would allow a page such as archives.aspx to be created and by default list every entry. It would not prevent archive display by month or individual entry.

The other option is to create an HTTP module. This module would intercept requests run some code and redirect to a specified page. This would allow me to use URL's that don't physically exist, parse the URL to determine what needs to be display, and redirect to a real page for rendering the content. An example of this would be a URL such as www.metaapps.com/archives/022002.aspx. The file, 022002.aspx wouldn't actually exist, instead the http module would parse the URL and redirect to default.aspx?archive=2002.2. This concept could be extended to categories as well.

Not sure which way I am going to go on this. I have already created an HTTP module for just this sort of thing, so that might be it.

Posted by Bryan @ 11:14 AM | Filed Under sure would be nice... | Comments (2) | # | TrackBack (0)