I built a website with classic ASP that has two types of URLs:
and
Will this be a problem for the site in terms of Google indexing content? Will Google incorrectly think I’m trying to “game” the system?
Michael Cyger
[ Admin ]
You don’t want Google or other search engines to ever think that there is duplicate information on your website. I can’t say for sure whether a search engine’s algorithm knows that /product/widget and /product/widget.asp are the same and will not penalize your website. No one knows except maybe Matt Cutts.
Your customer has some special coding that displays /widget.asp as /widget. Here’s what I’d do in this case:
1. Decide whether you want the website to use /widget.asp or /widget for all the pages. Make a rule. Write it down so you don’t forget.
2. Go through your entire website and find every case where the rule is not being followed. Fix every exception.
3. Create some sort of coding that can be included on every page (either Javascript or in ASP — you can have a small include file for every page, and just include it in the header) that redirects from whatever the “wrong” filename is to the “correct” filename.
4. Redo your site map or sitemap.xml (or whatever you’re using) and make sure that you only have the type of URLs that you want search engines to find.
With respect to #3 above, within ASP you can find out what the name of the page is that’s being displayed with something like this:
//determine page namepagename = Request.ServerVariables(“SCRIPT_NAME”)//now process it if it’s the wrong kind
if inStr(pagename, “.asp”) > 0 then
newpagename = Left(pagename,Len(pagename)-4)response.redirect “http://www.domain.com/product/” & newpagename
end if
It’s been a long time (thank goodness) since I’ve coded in ASP so please check the syntax! :)
