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Chances are, there are several different URLs that point to the same content on your website. For example, the URLs http:// yoursite .com , http:// yoursite .com/default.aspx , http://www. yoursite .com , or http://www. yoursite .com/default.aspx are all likely valid URLs that results in the same content, namely the homepage for yoursite .com . While having four different URLs reference the same content may not seem like a big deal, it can directly impact your website’s search engine placement and, consequently, it’s traffic. To a search engine, those four different URLs represent four different pages, even though the all produce the same content. To understand how allowing duplicate URLs in your website can affect your search engine placement, first understand that search engines base a page’s placement in the search results based, in part, on how many other websites link to the page. Now, imagine that there are 1,000 web pages from other websites that link to your homepage. You might conclude, then, that a search engine would rank the importance of your homepage based on those 1,000 links.

Search engine optimization , or SEO, is the practice of improving a website’s position in search engines’ results using unpaid techniques. A better (higher) position in the search results will, in theory, lead to more click throughs, increasing the website’s visibility and audience. There are a number of simple steps you can take on your website to improve your search engine ranking. A good first step is to download and run Microsoft’s free Search Engine Optimization Toolkit . Point it at a remote website and the SEO Toolkit will crawl the links on the site and identify potential problems and offer suggestions on how to fix them. ASP.NET 4 includes a handful of new methods, properties, and libraries to assist with search engine optimization, including ASP.NET Routing , permanent redirects, and the ability to programmatically specify values for certain <meta> tags. This article examines these enhancements and shows how they can be used for SEO purposes. Read on to learn more! Read More >

The previous installment in this ongoing article series showed how to configure the DataPager control to generate an SEO-friendly paging interface. By default, the DataPager renders its paging interface as a series of Buttons, LinkButtons, or ImageButtons that, when clicked, trigger a postback. The problem with postbacks is that they are not crawled by search engine spiders, meaning that with the default behavior only the first page of data will make it into the search engines’ indexes. Fortunately, the DataPager’s paging interface can be configured to include the page number in the querystring. When configured this way, the DataPager renders its paging interface using hyperlinks with URLs like Products.aspx?Page= PageNumber .

The GridView, FormView, and DetailsView controls all contain built-in paging functionality. By setting a few properties, it’s possible to have any of these controls automatically include a paging interface. The ListView, however, does not include built-in paging functionality. Instead, Microsoft decoupled the paging logic from the ListView and moved it into a separate Web control – the DataPager. Paging Through Data with the ListView and DataPager Controls , an earlier article in this series, explored how to use the DataPager to implement a paging interface for the ListView. By default, the DataPager renders Buttons, LinkButtons, or ImageButtons in the paging interface for the Next, Previous, First, Last, and numeric page number buttons. When clicked, these buttons cause a postback, at which point the appropriate set of records are bound to the ListView. Unfortunately, search engines cannot crawl a site using postbacks; instead, they rely on links they find on your site. Consequently, a search engine will only index the first page of data displayed by a ListView, because it cannot reach the subsequent pages.