3 replies to this topic

[Srvwiz]

Hi Friends,

I am in complete dead end after the last PR update.

Currently I am overseeing a website which was having a decent PR site wide.

This is something very strange..

Before PR update -

sitename.com/Default.aspx?tabid=1234 - was having PR 4

After PR update

sitename.com/default.aspx?tabid=1234 - id having PR 4

For the above case you will find that the URL with the lower case has now the PR. The same thing had happened site wide and with most of the URL's. My internal landing pages are ranking very high on their respective keywords and all are having uppercase URL's but my confusion that how come all my URL's with lower case got the PR and for the same URL with the Uppercase are showing grey bar.

Where could be the issue and where I am missing the catch????

Please advise, I really need some help here........

Srv

[Randy]

Only one or the other case should be a live url. That's the root cause of your problem.

Since you've apparently chosen to not make sure only one version is Live, you've effectively left it up to Google to decide which they think is the most important. They have. And it's apparently not the case version you would choose.

FTR, no I don't care that this sort of case insensitivitly is standard for IIS, it's still wrong.

[Randy]

Oh, and before any dedicated MS'er drops by to start a holy war, don't bother. First off, I'm not an MS hater. I in fact use MS products on all of my PC's, just not on my servers. Besides, even MS products themselves consider HTTP to be case sensitive, unlike IIS. Minor things like browser caching and even the NTFS file system are case sensitive. So why they choose to keep up this case insensitive silliness for anything having anything to do with HTTP is beyond me.

Srv: The fix is to install and use ISAPI filters to force everything to one url version. Most I've seen simply force everything to lowercase. Any upper case in a url gets redirected via 301 to a lowercase version. There are lots of places out there that show their ISAPI convert-to-lowercase filters

And I'll just point it out because I can...

The case insensitivity issue is one of those places where IIS actually makes it easy for competitors to screw with your site. Just think of all of the variations of your url an unscrupulous competitor can link to, creating a massive duplication problem for you to deal with.

That said, IIS still isn't as bad as .NET. Which of course MS wants everyone to install on their IIS server.

If you have a competitor on .NET you have even more ways to screw with them, because if you do it right you can add characters to the url address of any page on their site. Wanna test it on your site or see what I mean?

Look at these urls for MS's main English page:
http://www.microsoft...us/Default.aspx
http://www.microsoft...))/Default.aspx
http://www.microsoft...))/Default.aspx
http://www.microsoft...))/Default.aspx

They all deliver the exact same page. And I'll save you the trouble of looking, they all also deliver a 200 OK response. That's the miracle of .NET at work.

Now consider a competitor discovering your site is on IIS with .NET installed, and they decide to start a sabotage campaign to magically create 100+ url versions for every page on your site for you.

And people wonder why I've always refused to run Microsoft servers! There aren't enough hours in the day for me to develop workarounds to the configuation issues that are there out of the box.

[Srvwiz]

Hey Randy,

This is such a lovely and detailed response and guide. I really appreciate your effort here. You have been such a wonderful person to guide all around.

Thanks

I have the solution now and I know how to get it fixed.

Thanks

Srv