I am writing an article for aspalliance about making asp.net sites search engine friendly. This obviously brings me to the subject of URLs.
Regardless of if you believe there is any benefit to a search engine ranking doing this I think it is a lot kinder on your users to have static looking URLs. Which would you rather see?
http://www.somesite.com/?pageId=7627&catId=2367&site=Foo&caption=Elephant+Butt
or
http://www.somesite.com/photography/wildlife/elephant.aspx
?
So which is the right approach to acheive this?
Up until now I have done the HTTP module thing. Then I happened accross James Shaws new blog where he discusses this subject
http://www.coveryourasp.net/URLrewritingornot
He mentions using 404 handlers. I thought "that sounds easier, but won't it return a 404?". Well, James assures me it doesn't and he has tested the headers it returns too. That's good enough for me :O)