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IIS SEO Toolkit - New Reports (Redirects and Link Depth)

CarlosAg Blog — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:33:00 GMT

In the new version of the IIS SEO Toolkit we added two new reports that are very interesting, both from an SEO perspective as well as from user experience and site organization. These reports are located in the Links category of the reports Redirects This report shows a summary of all the redirects that were found while crawling the Web site. The first column (Linking-URL) is the URL that was visited that resulted in redirection to the Linked-URL (second column). The third column (Linking-Status code) specifies what type of redirection happened based on the HTTP status code enumeration. The most common values will be MovedPermanently/Moved which is a 301, or Found/Redirect which is a 302. The last column shows the status code for the final URL...(read more)

IIS SEO Toolkit - Start new analysis automatically through code

CarlosAg Blog — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:00:28 GMT

One question that I've been asked several times is: " Is it possible to schedule the IIS SEO Toolkit to run automatically every night? " . Other related questions are: " Can I automate the SEO Toolkit so that as part of my build process I'm able to catch regressions on my application? ", or " Can I run it automatically after every check-in to my source control system to ensure no links are broken? ", etc. The good news is that the answer is YES !. The bad news is that you have to write a bit of code to be able to make it work. Basically the SEO Toolkit includes a Managed code API to be able to start the analysis just like the User Interface does, and you can call it from any application you want using Managed Code...(read more)

Announcing: IIS SEO Toolkit v1.0 release

CarlosAg Blog — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:06:21 GMT

Today we are announcing the final release of the IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit v1.0 . This version builds upon the Beta 1 and Beta 2 versions and is 100% compatible with those versions so any report you currently have continues to work in the new version. The new version includes a set of bug fixes and new features such as: Extensibility . In this version we are opening a new set of API's to allow you to develop extensions for the crawling process, including the ability to augment the metadata in the report with your own, extend the set of tasks provided in the Site Analysis and Sitemaps User Interface and more. More on this on a upcoming post. New Reports . Based on feedback we added a Redirects summary report in the Links section...(read more)

IIS SEO Toolkit Presentation at DevConnections

CarlosAg Blog — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:41:00 GMT

Yesterday I presented the session "AMS04: Boost Your Site’s Search Ranking with the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit" at the ASP.NET Connections, it was fun to talk to a few attendees that had several questions around the tool and SEO in general. It is always really interesting learning about all the unique environments and types of applications that are being built and how the SEO Toolkit can help them. Here are the IIS SEO Toolkit slides that I used . Here you can find the IIS SEO Toolkit download . And by far the easiest way to get it installed is using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer . Please send any question and feedback at IIS SEO Toolkit Forums . And by the way, stay tuned for the RTW version of IIS SEO Toolkit coming SOON...(read more)

IIS SEO Toolkit – Report Comparison

CarlosAg Blog — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:09:00 GMT

One of my favorites features in the IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit is what we called Report Comparison. Report Comparison basically allows you to compare two different versions of the results of crawling the same site to see what changed in between. This is a really convenient way to track not only changes in terms of SEO violations but also to be able to compare any attributes on the pages such as Title, Heading, Description, Links, Violations, etc. How to access the feature There are a couple of ways to get to this feature. 1) Use the Compare Reports task. While in the Site Analysis Reports listing you can select two reports by using Ctrl+Click, and if both reports are compatible (e.g. they use the same Start URL) the task "Compare...(read more)

Presenting at ASP.NET Connections in Las Vegas

CarlosAg Blog — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:49:50 GMT

Next week I will be presenting at the ASP.NET Connections event in Las Vegas the following topics: AMS04: Boost Your Site’s Search Ranking with the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit : Search engines are just robots, and you have to play by their rules if you want to see your site in the top search results. In this session, you will learn how to leverage the IIS Search Engine Optimizer and other tools to improve your Web site for search engine and user traffic. You will leave this session with a set of tips and tricks that will boost the search rank, performance and consistency of your Web site. Tuesday 10:00 am. AMS10: Developing and Deploying for the Windows Web App Gallery : Come hear how the Microsoft Web Platform fosters a powerful...(read more)

Adding IIS Manager Users and Permissions using PowerShell

CarlosAg Blog — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:41:00 GMT

Today somebody ask in the IIS.net Forums how could they automate the process of adding IIS Manager Users and their Permissions using a script or a command line and I thought it would be useful to post something that hopefully will be easy to find and refer to. One way they found to do it through configuration however they were not getting the password encrypted. The first thing that I would like to highlight is that the password is not encrypted, it is actually stored as a hash which means just entering the password in clear text will not work the only way it will work is if you calculate the same hash our current implementation does. Having said that manually adding the users is also not a good idea since the IIS Manager functionality is extensible...(read more)

IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit – Announcing Beta 2

CarlosAg Blog — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Yesterday we released the Beta 2 version of the IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit . This version builds upon Beta 1 adding a set of new features and several bug fixes reported through the SEO forum : Report Comparison . Now you have the ability to compare two reports and track a lot of different metrics that changed in between such as New and Removed URLs, Changed and Unchanged URLs, Violations Fixed and new Violations introduced. You can also compare side-by-side the details as well as the contents to see exactly what changed both in markup, headers, or anywhere. This feature will allow you to easily keep track of changes on your Web site. More on this feature in a future blog . Authentication Support . Now you can crawl Web sites...(read more)

SEO Tip - Beware of the Login pages - add them to Robots Exclusion

CarlosAg Blog — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:55:17 GMT

A lot of sites today have the ability for users to sign in to show them some sort of personalized content, whether its a forum, a news reader, or some e-commerce application. To simplify their users life they usually want to give them the ability to log on from any page of the Site they are currently looking at. Similarly, in an effort to keep a simple navigation for users Web Sites usually generate dynamic links to have a way to go back to the page where they were before visiting the login page, something like: <a href="/login?returnUrl=/currentUrl">Sign in</a>. If your site has a login page you should definitely consider adding it to the Robots Exclusion list since that is a good example of the things you do not want...(read more)

Finding malware in your Web Site using IIS SEO Toolkit

CarlosAg Blog — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:43:00 GMT

The other day a friend of mine who owns a Web site asked me to look at his Web site to see if I could spot anything weird since according to his Web Hosting provider it was being flagged as malware infected by Google. My friend (who is not technical at all) talked to his Web site designer and mentioned the problem. He downloaded the HTML pages and tried looking for anything suspicious on them, however he was not able to find anything. My friend then went back to his Hosting provider and mentioned the fact that they were not able to find anything problematic and that if it could be something with the server configuration, to which they replied in a sarcastic way that it was probably ignorance on his Web site designer. Enter IIS SEO Toolkit So...(read more)

IIS SEO Tip - Do not stress your server, limit the number of concurrent requests

CarlosAg Blog — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 23:52:56 GMT

The other day somebody ask me if there was a way to limit the amount of work that Site Analysis in IIS SEO Toolkit would cause to the server. This is interesting for a couple of reasons, You might want to reduce the load that Site Analysis cause to your server at any given time You might have a Denial-of-service detection system such as our Dynamic IP Restrictions IIS module that will start failing requests based on number of requests in a certain amount of time Or If you like me have to go through a Proxy and it has a configured limit of number of requests per minute you are allowed to issue In Beta 1 we do not support the Crawl-delay directive in the Robots exclusion protocol ; in future versions we will look at adding support this setting...(read more)

Redirects, 301, 302 and IIS SEO Toolkit

CarlosAg Blog — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 02:40:49 GMT

In the URL Rewrite forum somebody posted the question " are redirects bad for search engine optimization ?". The answer is: not necessarily, Redirects are an important tool for Web sites and if used in the right context they actually are a required tool. But first a bit of background. What is a Redirect? A redirect in simple terms is a way for the server to indicate to a client (typically a browser) that a resource has moved and they do this by the use of an HTTP status code and a HTTP location header . There are different types of redirects but the most common ones used are: 301 - Moved Permanently. This type of redirect signals that the resource has permanently moved and that any further attempts to access it should be directed to...(read more)

Canonical Formats and Query Strings - IIS SEO Toolkit

CarlosAg Blog — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:23:51 GMT

Today somebody was running the IIS SEO Toolkit and using the Site Analysis feature flagged a lot of violations about "The page contains multiple canonical formats.". The reason apparently is that he uses Query String parameters to pass contextual information or other information between pages. This of course yield the question: Does that mean in general query strings are bad news SEO wise ? Well, the answer is not necessarily. I will start by clarifying that this violation in Site Analysis means that our algorithm detected that those two URL's look like the same content, note that we make no assumptions based on the URL (including Query String parameters). This kind of situation is bad for a couple of reasons: Based on the fact they...(read more)

Are you caching your images and scripts? IIS SEO can tell you

CarlosAg Blog — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 01:41:00 GMT

One easy way to enhance the experience of users visiting your Web site by increasing the perceived performance of navigating in your site is to reduce the number of HTTP requests that are required to display a page. There are several techniques for achieving this, such as merging scripts into a single file, merging images into a big image, etc, but by far the simplest one of all is making sure that you cache as much as you can in the client. This will not only increase the rendering time but will also reduce load in your server and will reduce your bandwidth consumption. Unfortunately the different types of caches and the different ways of set it can be quite confusing and esoteric. So my recommendation is to think about one way and use that...(read more)

Announcing: IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit Beta 1

CarlosAg Blog — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:24:00 GMT

Today we are releasing the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit . The IIS SEO Toolkit is a set of features that aim to help you keep your Web site and its content in good shape for both Users and Search Engines. The features that are included in this Beta release include: Site Analysis. This feature includes a crawler that starts looking at your Web site contents, discovering links, downloading the contents and applying a set of validation rules aimed to help you easily troubleshoot common problems such as broken links, duplicate content, keyword analysis, route analysis and many more features that will help you improve the overall quality of your Web site. Robots Exclusion Editor. This includes a powerful editor to author Robots Exclusion...(read more)