Comments on: ASP.NET MVC, What about SEO?

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 19 May 2009 03:57:17 +0000

Thanks for the info this is another great tip I found while developing SpiderLoop

By: Joe

Joe — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:09:09 +0000

I would think that the new rel=”canonical” link attribute (which is now supported by Google, Live, Yahoo, and Ask) would help to alleviate duplicate content issues. In fact, it may be hypothesized that this new attribute support may actually be in direct or indirect response to the rising prevalence of MVC/REST content organization. Routing is here to stay.

By: durdenet

durdenet — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:23:48 +0000

Great article!
I feel exactly the same. MVC routing sucks in terms of being SEO friendly (which is a must nowadays!).
I would call this a bug too, and for me the biggest negative side of MVC. I hope Microsoft fixes it ASAP. They should implement the 301 redirection out of the box and give a way to decide which version to display.
I have been penalized for duplicate content once before, and I will not fall on that again.
For now I have to write many 301 redirections manually and have a negative thought about MVC each time I do it..

By: ASP.NET MVC Pro’s and Con’s

ASP.NET MVC Pro’s and Con’s — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:53:48 +0000

[...] mentioned some of the SEO issues before, and all but the trailing slash issue have a reasonable workaround. The routing engine likes [...]

By: superjason

superjason — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:35:15 +0000

There are 2 important ideas here.

Concept 1: Age matters to Google. Pages that have been around longer tend to rank better. In general, you should try to never change your URL’s. I mentioned that I’ve specifically seen situations where this hurt a site for a couple of months.

Concept 2: Pages should have a single URL as to not show up as duplicate content, and to get links all pointing to the same place.

In an ideal world, you would never change your URL’s, and alternative versions of the page would do a 301 (permanent) redirect to the preferred version.

So, the solution is to generate consistent URL’s when you link to your own pages, and have a good way of correctly redirecting URL’s that are simply an alternative way of looking at the same page.

Obviously you’ll have to weight the cost of doing this with the search engine benefit.

By: Derik Whittaker

Derik Whittaker — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:05:08 +0000

So you say that using Routing to resolve multiple URL’s into a single page is very, very bad because it created duplicate content (not arguing that here).

However you fail to provide a better way. Both options you mention have pros/cons and I would rather have duplicate routes than loose engine traffic.

By: Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - ASP.NET MVC and the new IIS7 Rewrite Module

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - ASP.NET MVC and the new IIS7 Rewrite Module — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 09:23:25 +0000

[...] noticed a post by Jason Young recently on ASP.NET and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). He’s concerned about trailing [...]

By: Removing duplicate page addresses in MVC

Removing duplicate page addresses in MVC — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:13:40 +0000

[...] couple of SEO issues with MVC. I’ll discuss two ways to get around the trailing slash issue. Recall what the issue was. MVC will happily serve up your URL’s both with and without a trailing [...]