Do Virtual URLs Affect Rankings?

Our website is currently using physical ASPX files but we are looking to reduce maintenance by making these URLs virtual.

Because we are using .Net handlers, the urls remain on the address bar but the pages themselves won't exist.

Does anyone know if this is approved by search engines?

We do not want to go ahead with this if it's likelly to get us banned.

Thanks for your help.



Marco.

Lets see if I understand correctly ... all requests will go through a single page handling program, which in turns returns HTML to display the page.

If that is correct your entire site will exist under a single URL belonging to the page handler.

Google will not ban you, but only one page of your site will be indexed. Different URLs are required to keep track of your pages.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but are you using virtual URLS to replace the current URLS? As in, if I came to your site and looked at the address bar I'd see the virtual URLS but they would be serving up the content from the old URLS?

I don't see this being an issue, since the search engine spiders will not know the difference between the hard coded URL and the virtual URLS.

Rewriting the URLS using .Net virtual directories, or any other technology should be fine as long as you aren't serving up multiple pages under one URL. Also, you should take into account what might happen if somebody hacks the URL.

You'll also want to set up redirects from the hardcoded pages to the virtual URLs.

Thanks guys,

HTTP Handlers in .Net are very powerful and would allow me to create virtual urls but I dont want to spend the time if this is likelly to be detremental to my rankings.

The handling process works as follows:
- Users call a url (www.website.com/section/page.aspx)
- Because the page doesn't exist, .Net handles the request and populates the url with content stored in a database.
- The content and url load as with a static page.

Because the url remains on the address bar and the content is dynamically loaded, the user is unaware that the page is virtual.

Robots may or may not look at this process favourably, and is this which I'd like to have more info on before commiting to it.

Thanks again,

Marco

The robots only see what the browsers see. So if this process appears to your visitors as content being served from a static url then that's what the robots will see also.

OK .. thanks for clearing that up a little bit. Much better scenario than my first assumption.

Just one more thing, is this a custom 404 (page not found) routine?

If a user mistypes a URL will they be presented with random content from the database?

My concern here is that duplicate content could be returned on several different URLs.