Canonical referencing and aspx

[IPROdigital]

The following pages of my website all end up at the same place:
http://example.com/seo/Default.aspx
http://example.com/SEO/
http://example.com/seo
http://example.com/sEo
http://example.com/SeO

but we have a really messy URL structure throughout the website.

I would like to have a neat URL structure, including for offline marketing so customers can easily memorize or even guess the URL.

I'm thinking of duplicating the pages and canonical referencing the original ones with the messy URLs instead of a 301 redirect (done for each individual page of course), because the latter will likely result in a traffic drop. We've got tens of thousands of URLs; some active and some inactive.

Bearing in mind that thousands of links already point in to the site and even a small percentage drop in traffic would be a serious problem given low industry margins and high marketing spend, I'd love to hear opinions of people who have encountered this issue and found it problematic or successful.

@randfish to the rescue. I hope.

[Vahe.Arabian]

Hi Gutam,

Based on your provided URL's it seems that your website is built using .NET, as your mentioned problem is common problem for these type of sites.

Assuming that your website server is on IIS, it would be best to install both the IIS toolkit and the URL rewriter on your server.

Use the IIS SEO toolkit to first identify all the technical SEO problems and then the URL rewriter to redirect and create your search friendly URL's.

Dave Sottimano (from Distilled) has written a good post on using IIS SEO toolkit for site analysis -http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-every-seo-should-know-about-iis

Here's one pretty good post (abit outdated) on how to deal with the most common URL errors using the URL rewriter - http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/04/20/tip-trick-fix-common-seo-problems-using-the-url-rewrite-extension.aspx

Good Luck!

Vahe

[IPROdigital]

Thanks! That's helpful of you!

[Dr-Pete]

Are those URLs (or URLs like them - I realize they're just examples) actually being used in internal links, or are you just saying that they all resolve? The case-sensitivity thing isn't a huge issue, and the canonical tag would work well for that. Otherwise, you'd have to 301-redirect every possibly version (and 98% of them will never be used).

I'd really focus on fixing the internal links first, and then 301 or canonical the versions you used internally (or that have inbound/external links). For the "Default.aspx" version, I think 301s are a little better, but ASPX can be a bit persistent about that, so it's a bit hard to advise. Sometimes, you are constrained by the platform.

The biggest difference is that a 301-redirect will also redirect people, so they'll be more likely to link to the proper version. The canonical tag only impacts Google. Both work reasonably well, though, and do pass on most link-juice if used properly.