[thelist] Architecture/SEO question

Tom Dell'Aringa pixelmech at yahoo.com
Tue Oct 5 09:28:38 CDT 2004


Hi everyone,

This kind of goes along with the ASP to JSP conversation since I noticed it in context. For a long
time I was always under the impression that you had a web server which served up all the content
(aside from DB stuff of course) that you needed. I guess this is because I was never really
involved on that side of things.

At my current job, our architecture involves WebLogic 7 (soon to be 8) serving up dynamic JSP
content, with IIS proxy in front. IIS handles all static content (css, pictures, the like). I'm
told that IIS is umpteen times better performance wise at handling the static content, when I
asked why we didn't just serve everything up with WebLogic. 

Understand that the sites we are building now are very light on images. Yet they assure me to move
that to WebLogic would give us a serious hit in performance. 

Apparently this also has something to do with clustering and some other stuff which I didn't
understand :D

Now, the question. This is standard operating procedure? To have a web server serve up static
content and an app server serve up dynamic content, correct?

Our problem with this is search engine optimization. This current architecture gives us homepage
urls like:

www.site.com/site/homepage.jsp

This is generally a 302 or 301 redirection. For SEO you want

www.site.com

period - nothing else. In particular the redirection hurts your rankings - even if it is a
permanent 301. I'm just wondering how others have handled this and what means they have gotten
themselves a static home page (if they have at all).

So far our only solution is to build a static home page on IIS.

Tom

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