Posted by Dave Sottimano

IIS Server through the eyes of an SEO

Disclaimer: This post is long and technical, but has been lovingly paraphrased for the benefit of non-technical SEOs to get involved and step out of their comfort zone. Recently, I’ve had to deal with sites running on IIS and rather than just prescribing universal SEO fixes, I decided to get my hands really, really dirty. This is what I’ve learned…

In this post: (Use the navigation links, trust me!)

1. Brief explanation of what IIS is
2. Why SEOs should care about IIS
3. How to get a free, super powerful crawler – You need Windows 7
4. IIS "out of the box SEO faults" you need to know about
5. The Chaining 301 disease and a way to fix it
6. Interview / SEO Resource guide for IIS 7+ - with Mark Ridley
7. Possible sexual attraction to Microsoft products

Internet Information Services (IIS) is the second most popular web server in the world to Apache. IIS’s first big gig was in 1995 and still continues to power a massive portion of the internet today. Read more about Microsoft's history on the web

• You’ll likely have a client sooner or later that uses IIS
• There are some common SEO faults with IIS that you need to know
• Fixing those default "faults" can significantly improve the site's SEO
• You need to understand how this beast works before you say “301” or “clean URL”
• I will show you how to get a free kickass crawler – You need Windows 7 on your machine
• If you can speak IIS, those super smart developers will instantly warm up to you
• IIS popularity is growing (see image below)

IIS isn’t going anywhere, in fact it’s growing. Whether you appreciate Microsoft products or not, there are many that do and there’s no doubt that you’ll likely have to consult a client running IIS.

Requirements: Windows 7 (automatically comes with IIS 7.5)Sorry Mac! – muhahaha How: IIS server & SEO toolkit on your Windows 7 machine Why: It’s frickin incredible – It will make your SEO life much much easier. Difficulty: Easy Estimated Completion time: 5-7 minutes

 

Why it's so cool!

Watch this video, and tell me you DON'T need this beast :)

• Reports on content, SEO and other violations. Tells you how to fix it in plain english
• You can add your own custom violations
• Fully functional database of what's going on with your site
• Tons and tons of custom reporting, including mapping navigation paths
• Find orphaned pages from Sitemap
• And much much more. You expected that right :)

 

We can get you up and running in 10 minutes (minimum requirements): follow these instructions– this is EASY.

First, install IIS Server

1. Start > Settings > Control Panel
2. Programs & Features
3. Click on "Turn Windows Features on/off"
4. Find the Internet Information Services folder, expand it
5. Expand the Web Management tools folder
6. Make sure IIS Management Console is checked, click OK

Next, the IIS toolkit - Post here with screenshots

1. Download the IIS Web Platform Installer, and install it
2. Click on Start, search for "Web platform installer", open it up
3. Once in the web platform, type in "SEO" in the search bar - top right
4. It should be the last item in the list "Search Engine Optimisation Toolkit", click add, then install
5. Click on start, type in: inetmgr
6. Look for the Icon that says "Search Engine Optimisation Toolkit", and double click
7. You're done! You now have an insane, free crawler on your machine :)

Now you need to:

1. Crawl a site!
2. Understand the analysis!
3. Enjoy, you'll love it :)

Read Microsoft's official instructions for the IIS SEO toolkit

See more info. Example of a default document: www.example.com/index.html www.example.com - will return the same content, different URLs

• Case insensitive
IIS by default will serve the same content regardless of casing Example: www.eXaMpLe.com and www.example.com are the same content, different URLs
• Works with www and non www (site canonicalization)
By default, like most servers you'll get the same content from www.example.com and example.com

Why it’s a problem: You get a hard earned inbound link to the wrong URL and it doesn’t give you full credit – “but it’s the same page!” No, it’s not, and no, Google doesn’t magically fix this even though they try.

But hey! No one is going to link to your site like this! Right? cc Matt Cutts 2006

• www.example.com/
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/INDEX.html

Yes, yes they do. Not on purpose, but they do.

This is a very real problem for older, larger sites that hadn’t canonicalized their domain, or bothered with consistent URL structure in the past. Fast forward to 2011 and we SEOs start nitpicking for every bit of link juice and we notice that we’re missing out on all of these external links because we’re not redirecting these inbound links to the right pages. We need to write some permanent redirect rules to catch these.

Simple, right? When someone links to our real page www.example.com/blog/ like this: example.com/Blog

We just do a 301 redirect back to www.example.com/blog/ ! Happy days right? Please continue…

It’s best to explain this by example. Open up this page from Cheapflights.co.uk.

Notice the capital L (london)? What happens when we request http://www.cheapflights.co.uk/flights/london/?

 

Brilliant! Even if someone i