Thursday July 1, 2010

Mind Your Canonical Tags - Latency Issues

Introduction & Backstory

We had a site recently that was built to have a number of dynamically generated pages based on geographic locations. These were setup using a URL rewriting tool for “pretty URLs” and as such we wanted to make sure that Google always attributes the page to the nicer “pretty URLs” instead of the possible alternate URLs that include QueryString variables.

For this specific case, Google pioneered the “Canonical Tag” which is a flavor of the LINK tag that looks like this:

<link rel=“canonical” href=“http://dbdnet.com/” />

Where the “href” attribute is the desired URL for the page being looked at.

With this tag Google views it as a recommendation from the web developer…

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Tuesday April 20, 2010

ASP.NET 4.0, Extensionless Urls, and the eurl.axd errors

Apparently ASP.NET 4.0 has something special for “extensionless URLs”—which is what we get from using ISAPI_Rewrite on our Windows Server 2003 machines. The symptom we were seeing was that the URL Rewriting kept unexpectedly returning something similar to this:

eurl.axd/ADkfjsFiSofmaWOeiejrlErF

so rewriting something like:

/myrewrite/articleID/articleName/

would end up rewriting to:

/myrewrite.aspx?id=eurl.axd/ADkfjsFi…..

On the server’s Registry Editor (regedit) I followed this article’s “option 3” and turned off the EnableExtensionlessUrls, which is a DWORD set to 0 (zero) within HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ASP.NET\4.0.30319.0 —then you must run theh iisreset command-line tool.

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