Are you an developer/owner/publisher/etc of a site that uses HTTPS (SSL) for secure access? If you are, please continue to read.
Have you ever visited a Web site that is secured using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) just to get an ugly Security Warning message like:
Do you want to view only the webpage content that was delivered securely?
This webpage contains content that will not be delivered using a secure HTTPS connection, which could compromise the security of the entire webpage.
Last week we released a refresh for the IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit v1.0. This version is a minor update that includes fixes for all the important bugs reported in the IIS.NET SEO Forum.
Some of the fixes included in this version are:
In this blog we are going to write an example on how to extend the SEO Toolkit functionality, so for that we are going to pretend our company has a large Web site that includes several images, and now we are interested in making sure all of them comply to a certain standard, lets say all of them should be smaller than 1024x768 pixels and that the quality of the images is no less than 16 bits per pixel. Additionally we would also like to be able to make custom queries that can later allow us to further analyze the contents of the images and filter based on directories and more.
For this we will extend the SEO Toolkit crawling process to perform the additional processing for images, we will be adding the following new capabilities:
The IIS SEO Toolkit includes a lot of functionality built-in such as built-in violation rules, processing of different content types (like HTML, CSS, RSS, etc) and more, however it might not do all the things that you would need it to do, for example, it might not process a set of documents that you use, or it might not gather all the information that you are interested in while processing a document. The good news is that it includes enough extensibility to let you build on top of its rich capabilities and provide additional ones easily using .NET.
There are three main extensibility points in this first release, including:
Two weeks ago I presented at DevConnections the talk "AMS10: Developing and Deploying for the Windows Web App Gallery", here are the slides.
Download the Web Application Gallery Talk slides here.
A few final links:
Microsoft Web Platform: http://www.microsoft.com/web/
Download Web PI: http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx
Submit your Applications at: http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/developer.aspx
In the new version of the IIS SEO Toolkit we added two new reports that are very interesting, both from an SEO perspective as well as from user experience and site organization. These reports are located in the Links category of the reports
This report shows a summary of all the redirects that were found while crawling the Web site. The first column (Linking-URL) is the URL that was visited that resulted in redirection to the Linked-URL (second column). The third column (Linking-Status code) specifies what type of redirection happened based on the HTTP status code enumeration. The most common values will be MovedPermanently/Moved which is a 301, or Found/Redirect which is a 302. The last column shows the status code for the final URL so you can easily identify redirects that failed or that redirected to another redirect.
One question that I've been asked several times is: "Is it possible to schedule the IIS SEO Toolkit to run automatically every night?". Other related questions are: "Can I automate the SEO Toolkit so that as part of my build process I'm able to catch regressions on my application?", or "Can I run it automatically after every check-in to my source control system to ensure no links are broken?", etc.
The good news is that the answer is YES!. The bad news is that you have to write a bit of code to be able to make it work. Basically the SEO Toolkit includes a Managed code API to be able to start the analysis just like the User Interface does, and you can call it from any application you want using Managed Code.
Today we are announcing the final release of the IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit v1.0. This version builds upon the Beta 1 and Beta 2 versions and is 100% compatible with those versions so any report you currently have continues to work in the new version. The new version includes a set of bug fixes and new features such as:
Yesterday I presented the session "AMS04: Boost Your Site’s Search Ranking with the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit" at the ASP.NET Connections, it was fun to talk to a few attendees that had several questions around the tool and SEO in general. It is always really interesting learning about all the unique environments and types of applications that are being built and how the SEO Toolkit can help them.
Here are the IIS SEO Toolkit slides that I used.
Here you can find the IIS SEO Toolkit download.
And by far the easiest way to get it installed is using the
One of my favorites features in the IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit is what we called Report Comparison. Report Comparison basically allows you to compare two different versions of the results of crawling the same site to see what changed in between. This is a really convenient way to track not only changes in terms of SEO violations but also to be able to compare any attributes on the pages such as Title, Heading, Description, Links, Violations, etc.
There are a couple of ways to get to this feature.
1) Use the Compare Reports task. While in the Site Analysis Reports listing you can select two reports by using Ctrl+Click, and if both reports are compatible (e.g. they use the same Start URL) the task "Compare Reports" will be shown. Just clicking on that will get you the comparison.
Next week I will be presenting at the ASP.NET Connections event in Las Vegas the following topics:
Today somebody ask in the IIS.net Forums how could they automate the process of adding IIS Manager Users and their Permissions using a script or a command line and I thought it would be useful to post something that hopefully will be easy to find and refer to.
One way they found to do it through configuration however they were not getting the password encrypted.
The first thing that I would like to highlight is that the password is not encrypted, it is actually stored as a hash which means just entering the password in clear text will not work the only way it will work is if you calculate the same hash our current implementation does.
Having said that manually adding the users is also not a good idea since the IIS Manager functionality is extensible and its storage can be replaced to store the users in SQL Server or any other backend. Our built-in implementation stores them in Administration.config but at any given time someone could have a different
Yesterday we released the Beta 2 version of the IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit. This version builds upon Beta 1 adding a set of new features and several bug fixes reported through the SEO forum:
A lot of sites today have the ability for users to sign in to show them some sort of personalized content, whether its a forum, a news reader, or some e-commerce application. To simplify their users life they usually want to give them the ability to log on from any page of the Site they are currently looking at. Similarly, in an effort to keep a simple navigation for users Web Sites usually generate dynamic links to have a way to go back to the page where they were before visiting the login page, something like: <a href="/login?returnUrl=/currentUrl">Sign in</a>.
If your site has a login page you should definitely consider adding it to the Robots Exclusion list since that is a good example of the things you do not want a search engine crawler to spend their time on. Remember you have a limited amount of time and you really want them to focus on what is important in your site.
The other day a friend of mine who owns a Web site asked me to look at his Web site to see if I could spot anything weird since according to his Web Hosting provider it was being flagged as malware infected by Google.
My friend (who is not technical at all) talked to his Web site designer and mentioned the problem. He downloaded the HTML pages and tried looking for anything suspicious on them, however he was not able to find anything. My friend then went back to his Hosting provider and mentioned the fact that they were not able to find anything problematic and that if it could be something with the server configuration, to which they replied in a sarcastic way that it was probably ignorance on his Web site designer.
So of course I decided the first thing I would do is to