{"id":799,"date":"2018-01-12T21:23:13","date_gmt":"2018-01-12T21:23:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.netexl.com\/blog\/?p=799"},"modified":"2026-04-02T10:02:32","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T10:02:32","slug":"url-rewrite-seo-in-iis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.netexl.com\/blog\/url-rewrite-seo-in-iis\/","title":{"rendered":"URL Rewrite SEO in IIS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since the advent of search engines URL rewriting has become mandatory. It makes URLs look nicer and clearer in terms of what content to\u00a0expect at the given URL. Recently I uploaded few static HTML files to an IIS site. I wanted a nice looking URL without .html extension which was quite straight-forward to achieve in ASP.NET site. You can install URL Rewrite Module<\/span>\u00a0in IIS 7 or above versions and a few configuration steps is all that is required to achieve the desired results.<\/p>\n

Read this<\/a> article from Microsoft to get in-depth understanding of the steps. Below is the sample web.config entry I had to make to achieve the results<\/p>\n

<configuration>\r\n\r\n  <system.webServer>\r\n\r\n    <rewrite>\r\n      <rules>\r\n        <rule name=\"Rewrite to .html Rule\">\r\n          <match url=\"^games\/([_0-9a-z-]+)\" \/>\r\n          <action type=\"Rewrite\" url=\"games\/{R:1}.html\" \/>\r\n        <\/rule>\r\n      <\/rules>\r\n    <\/rewrite> \r\n\r\n  <\/system.webServer>\r\n\r\n<\/configuration><\/pre>\n
You will need some understanding of the regular expressions to create a matching pattern for your URL (match tag in web.config) and map it to actual resource on the server which is defined in action tag. Here I am simply looking to match following condition for the URL<\/p>\n
    \n
  1. Starts with the sequence of characters “games\/”.<\/li>\n
  2. Contains one or more alphanumeric or “_” or “-” characters after the\u00a0first “\/”.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    And within 5 mins of effort I had a nice looking SEO friendly URL.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
    Since the advent of search engines URL rewriting has become mandatory. It makes URLs look nicer and clearer in terms of what content to\u00a0expect at the given URL. Recently I uploaded few static HTML files to an IIS site. I wanted a nice looking URL without .html extension which was quite straight-forward to achieve in ASP.NET site. You can install URL Rewrite Module\u00a0in IIS 7 or above versions and a few configuration steps is all that is required to achieve the desired results. Read this article from Microsoft to get in-depth understanding of the steps. Below is the sample web.config entry I had to make to achieve the results <configuration> <system.webServer> <rewrite> <rules> <rule name=”Rewrite to .html Rule”> <match url=”^games\/([_0-9a-z-]+)” \/> <action type=”Rewrite” url=”games\/{R:1}.html” \/> <\/rule> <\/rules> <\/rewrite> <\/system.webServer> <\/configuration> You will need some understanding of the regular expressions to create a matching pattern for your URL (match tag in[…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1540,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,14,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asp-net","category-how-to","category-seo"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.netexl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.netexl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.netexl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.netexl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.netexl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=799"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.netexl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":802,"href":"https:\/\/www.netexl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799\/revisions\/802"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.netexl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.netexl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.netexl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.netexl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}