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I have created a directory based site in ASP.NET MVC3 which when you navigate through the site you get to a page like http://server/domains/details/mydomain.coop.

The rest of the site works fine however when you go to this url you get a page not found error. I have put logging in to the controllers and the action in the controller is not fired. It works fine on my local machine (VS2010 / W7) but when it it is put on to the live servers (MS 2003 server IIS6) it breaks.

If the url does not contain the "." in the final domain name part (the bit that is passed through to the optional parm "id" on the default route then it all works.

Does anybody have any ideas what I can do as I really want the "." in the id part for SEO

Many thanks

Jonathan

Jonathan Stanton
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  • It has to do with MVC3 Routing... You have to create a special route. To help you we need more details. Is mydomain.coop static ? or you mean anything.coop? and same goes for the full url, is it for a particular controller/action combo or for any? The devil is in the details... – AJC Oct 21 '11 at 14:24
  • The example above is one of the urls that is not working. if I had put "http://server/domains/details/mydomain-coop" it woudl work. I have tried changing both the controller as well as the action but it still fails. – Jonathan Stanton Oct 30 '11 at 22:01

2 Answers2

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You could use a - to make your url like http://server/domains/details/mydomain-coop. I'm not sure of the SEO implications, but I can't imagine it being better or worse than a .

Simon
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Periods and other punctuation have a very specific meaning in URLs - in this case, it indicates a file extension, which is used to determine which IIS modules and filters (I always get these two confused) are activated to handle a request.

You should really think twice about formatting your URLs this way; non-standard uses like this are not your friend.

Conjecture: It's possible that a search engine may use the part after the . to determine MIME type, and either ding your score if it doesn't match the actual page content, or it could ignore the link entirely. Note that, for instance, Google indexes images and pages differently based on both file extension and MIME type (though someone more versed in the dark magic of Google's internals may chime in with a better/more accurate explanation.)

Here's a nice post on getting ASP.NET to ignore certain file extensions,

See also this SO question about a similar issue (registering custom file extensions - in this case, .coop)

The important web.config entries from the second link are:

<httpHandlers> 
... 
<add verb="*" path="*.mycustomextension"> type="System.Web.UI.PageHandlerFactory"/> 

<compilation > 
      <buildProviders> 
          <add extension=".mycustomextension" type="System.Web.Compilation.PageBuildProvider" />  
      </buildProviders>

I haven't had time to test this, but hopefully it'll get you going in the right direction.

Community
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3Dave
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