[SLUG] Reason not to use NT #8463

[Rev Simon Rumble <simon@nospam.rumble.net>]

I consult one day/week at a company that runs NT and IIS as its web
servers.  It's a web company (a dot-commie?) so of course the marketing
people look at how we're ranked in the search engines and are keen to
spam the engines and all that.  However we've come up with a limitation
in IIS that will stop the site from being in the search engines at all!

Most (but not all) search engines don't follow links that look like
common scripting languages -- .cgi, .pl, .asp, .php will stop them dead
in their tracks.  As well, anything with a querystring (blah?record=1)
will stop them.  The rationale is that search engines could easily get
stuck in a loop or be indexing useless information like a postcode
database.

So, to get around this what people do on Apache and AOLserver is to tell
the server that anything beneath a particular URL, say /blah/, it should
actually run a script and not look for something in the file space.  So
if you put in /blah/dog it will run the script.  That way your site
looks like a flat HTML site but is actually all dynamic.

IIS doesn't seem to be able to do this.  So the moral of the story is,
if you want to do a dynamic site and be linked from search engines,
don't use IIS!

(There is, apparently and we're checking this out, a dodgy way to do it
by changing the custom 404 page not found script but sheesh!)

-- 
Rev Simon Rumble          Opinions expressed in this email may
simon@nospam.rumble.net          not reflect those of the host brain.
http://www.rumble.net  
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