What Every SEO Should Know About IIS

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!)

Brief explanation of what IIS is

Why SEOs should care about IIS

How to get a free, super powerful crawler ? You need Windows 7

IIS "out of the box SEO faults" you need to know about

The Chaining 301 disease and a way to fix it

Interview / SEO Resource guide for IIS 7+ – with Mark Ridley

Possible sexual attraction to Microsoft products

What is IIS?

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

Why should you (SEOs) care about IIS?

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.

How to get free powerful crawler