There seems to be a .NET 2 problem that affects Friendly URLs. This may cause Google to not index the site, and even drop the site from its index's!
When reading the article below I realized that this might affect EPiServer. A quick test in EPiServer 4.60 with friendly urls and .NET 2 showed that the problem did affect EPiServer in my testenvironment.
http://todotnet.com/archive/0001/01/01/7472.aspx
Please read the full article and try for yourself before using friendly urls in EPiServer with .NET 2.
Disclaimer:
I only had a short time to test this and might have done something wrong. It does seems to be a very important problem so I posted this to make other aware of it and hopefully conducting more thourogh tests.
- Johan B
There does appear to be a problem with Friendly URL's and ASP.Net 2.0 - following up from your article i have posted a blog entry at http://nick.bluecog.co.nz/?p=7.
In short the Friendly URL's are fine as long as you provide browser caps files for the search bots that you want to allow to index the site.
Hopefully Microsoft will recognise the bug and release a fix at some point.
There's another to this problem. See David Findley's blog entry:
http://weblogs.asp.net/dfindley/archive/2006/09/05/Problems-with-RewritePath-and-Search-Engines_2E00_.aspx
This can in some cases be a better solution because it's solves the problem on all types of user agents. We have seen problems on Mac OS clients as well. Try the Firefox addon "User Agent Switcher" on an EpiServer site. For example the user agent below crashes many epi sites with friendly urls.
PPC Mac OS X Firefox 2.0.0.4:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4)