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URL Rewriting

Recently it came to my attention that google and other major search engines were no longer indexing querystrings. I'm not sure when the switch took place but on a number of sites I maintain the majority of the content is no longer indexed.

Enter URL Rewriting which allows us to convert:
http://foo.com/tools/product/mcleod

Into
http://foo.com/tools.aspx?product=mcleod

This is extremely commonplace in the Apache world, but how do we accomplish it within IIS?

Today I downloaded Helicon's ISAPI_Rewrite 2.11 Lite. It's free and best of all it works off regular expressions.

Installation and Configuration
1.) Download ISAPI_Rewrite
2.) Install
3.) Open the global httpd.ini file
Start > Programs > Helicon > ISAPI_Rewrite > httpd.ini
4.) Add a rule to process querystrings, in this example we'll loop through the querystring of all files ending in .aspx
[ISAPI_Rewrite]

# Repath .aspx files
RewriteRule (.*?\.aspx)(\?[^/]*)?/([^/]*)/([^/]*)(.*) $1(?2$2&:\?)$3=$4$5 [NS,I]


This will turn:
http://foo.com/tools/product/mcleod

Into:
http://foo.com/tools.aspx?product=mcleod

Extra points if you've actually used a McLeod (or at least know what one is).

The Lite version of ISAPI_Rewrite only works at the global level, and cannot be configured to work differently in each virtual directory. So far it is working really well, and I may be buying a full version in the near future.

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