Using URL rewriting to make money from google and search engines

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Introduction

MODURL The Easy Way:

Package Contents:

• URL Rewriter sln
• Sample Web Project
• Table Scripts
• WebConfig File
• SQL Scripts to create the stored procedure and database tables

You can create a URL rewriting component for asp.net.

The two site examples are:

• www.collegecupcakes.com
• www.bongofdestiny.com

Inital Problem:

Need a way to create nice URLS that search engines like for a content page. The goal of this was to be able to add content pages to a site, and automatically have the URL rewritten and pull from a DB.

The content site has an article summary page and an article detail page. Without URL rewriting the links as the search engine would see them are

http://bongofdestiny.com/GenericContentHandler.aspx?ContentID=35
http://bongofdestiny.com/GenericContentHandler.aspx?ContentID=33

or

http://www.collegecupcakes.com/index.aspx?CurrentImageID=211
http://www.collegecupcakes.com/GenericContentHandler.aspx?ContentID=6

Couple reason we want to change this:

• Search Engines like words
• It is not apprant to the user what the link is.
• If you email the link, it may be truncated in the email.

Look how much better these URLS look:

http://www.collegecupcakes.com/Carol-211-Fun.aspx
http://www.collegecupcakes.com/Party-With-No-Hangover.aspx

Or

http://bongofdestiny.com/Tenacious-D-Explosivo-Video.aspx
http://bongofdestiny.com/Tenacious-D-Song-Lyrics.aspx

That is the goal of this project

NOTE: much thanks to Scott Mitchell from 4GuysFromRolla.com. He created the base set of code that does the hard work. I just extended it to work with a database.

This is the original article this is based on:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/urlrewriting.asp

Now, lets see how to do this:

Step 1:

Add a referece to the URLWriter.dll to your asp.net project (1.0 or 2.0 doesn't matter). It is already compiled and ready to go in the download.

Step 2:

Add the following to your web.config. This tells asp.net to send the request through the URLwriter etc

<configSections>
<!-- The <configSections> element must contain a <section> tag for the <RewriterConfig> 
 section element. The type of the section handler is RewriterConfigSerializerSectionHandler, 
which is responsible for deserializing the <RewriterConfig> section element into a 
RewriterConfig instance... -->
  <section name="RewriterConfig" 
           type="URLRewriter.Config.RewriterConfigSerializerSectionHandler, URLRewriter"/>
</configSections>

Data base connection to look up the URLS in a table

</appSettings>
<add key="MODURLDB" 
 value="Data Source=[YourSQLServer];Initial Catalog=[DataBaseName];User ID=[YourUserID];Password=[YourPassword]"/>
</appSettings>

This tells asp.net what to use for the httpmodules

<httpModules>
<add type="URLRewriter.ModuleRewriter, URLRewriter" name="ModuleRewriter"/>
</httpModules>

(There is a sample web.config in the download for this source code

Step 3:

Create the tables in the database using the scripts URLWriterDBTableScripts.sql
This creates 2 tables and stored procedures The stored procedures are called by the URLWriter.dll

The page table is "PageMod" which lists the "LookFor" and "SendTo". When a request is made, the http handlers will look for the URL in the dataset, and if it finds it, it sends it to the "sendTo". If it doesnt find it, it passes the request on normally.

This creates 2 tables:

PageMod: holds the "LookFor" & "SendTo" columns for the urlrewriter engine
PageContentLive: This table holds content for the site. Notice the "PageMod" column, and the keywords, description
This is a template table, so you can create a page that has a list of the links, to the content, and display the links to the user.
On trick is to have a trigger on the "On Insert" event of a record, to auto populate the records in the PageMod table.

Step 4:

Set the connection string in the web.config file for the URL Rewriter
That is the basic setup. If you want to look at the code, have at it. Let me know if there are any changes that would make it better.

Now here is was you need to put into the table to test: The syntax must be exact:

When the request comes in for:

http://bongofdestiny.com/Tenacious-D-Lyrics-Kyle-Quit-The-Band.aspx

or

http://www.collegecupcakes.com/Carol-211-Fun.aspx

It is sent to

http://bongofdestiny.com/GenericContentHandler.aspx?ContentID=43

or

http://www.collegecupcakes.com//index.aspx?CurrentImageID=211

So in the table your would have

[SAMPLE LOOK FOR ROOT] 
~/Tenacious-D-Lyrics-Kyle-Quit-The-Band\.aspx
or
~/Carol-211-Fun\.aspx 

(The final slash before the .aspx is so the regular expression engines can quick look for it.

[SAMPLE SEND TO ROOT]
~/GenericContentHandler.aspx?ContentID=43
or
~/index.aspx?CurrentImageID=211 

So that is the basics of how the thing works. This is my first article, so please let me know if it all works.

Source code information:

In the source code,

RewriterConfiguration.cs
GetConfig
This is where the settings are grabbed from the database

This is the data access component to access the database
MODDALC.cs

Appconfig setting:
MODURLDB

Let me know if this helps and what we can do to extend the functionality