Our website is currently using physical ASPX files but we are looking to reduce maintenance by making these URLs virtual.

Because we are using .Net handlers, the urls remain on the address bar but the pages themselves won't exist.

Does anyone know if this is approved by search engines?

We do not want to go ahead with this if it's likelly to get us banned.

Thanks for your help.

Marco.

Can anyone else shed some light on this issue?

I don't think jaygully's answer will do my career any favours at the next meeting with senior management.

Thanks again,

Marco

As Daniel points out, it depends on what you mean. The web is a lovely place full of ambiguous words used to describe things :-)

My interpretation of your question is that you current use URLs along the lines of http://www.domain.com/page.aspx and http://www.domain.com/page2.aspx
Perhaps you even use URLs with ugly parameters such as http://www.domain.com/news.aspx?id=132

You want to move away from having to have physical .aspx files on your server and have URLs that map to perhaps one physical file. For example:

http://www.domain.com/privacy.html or http://www.domain.com/about/careers.html

Could then map to a single .aspx file on your system. This makes grand sense and is a common strategy for modern web applications. Essentially you have manually created URLs which map to a router file which then does the work of serving content.

The mapping bit is usually done by URL rewriting on Apache, but presumably you use Microsoft IIS so I'm not sure what the best solution is there (as a sidenote, I'd be interested to hear what you do use).

Having real human-readable URLs that don't include parameters is good for both human and search engine users. Including good keywords in URLs can help SEO, combined with good text on your actual page.

It is possibly from your suggestion you'll change the URLs across the site. If this occurs make sure you set up redirects that return a status 301 (moved permanently) which ensure any old URLs work. Killing off established URLs is a bad idea but with redirects in place you can change URLs and ensure old links aren't broken. Broken links will affect SEO

So short answer: using virtual URLs will very likely improve SEO as long as you're careful about setting up redirects for any old links.

Some nice tips on URLs - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990321.html
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980614.html

best wishes,
Simon

i can't see any problems with this

Si

Excellent... music to my ears... I shall now go into my meeting full of confidence and armed with the answer to a question they are bound to ask.

Thanks again for all your input Dan, and to everyone else who contributed.

Keep up the good work.

Marco