The different VPCs or site template released by the Commerce Server team was all without the url rewriting enabled. Which is not good from a SEO perspective. But it’s understandable as you can have many different ways to achieve that. The solution I’ll expose here is about a news IIS module released shortly: URL Rewrite Module. This module is an extension of IIS7.0 and brings you very nice features:
- Rules-based URL rewriting engine
- Regular expression pattern matching
- Wildcard pattern matching
- Global and distributed rewrite rules
- Access to server variables and HTTP headers
- Various rule actions including redirect and request abort
- Support for IIS kernel mode and user mode output caching
- Lower case conversion function
- Rewrite maps to generate the substitution URL during rewriting
- Failed Request Tracing support
- Built-in rule templates
- Integrated user interface for testing regular expression and wildcard patterns
- Integrated user interface for managing rewrite rules and rewrite maps
- Integrated user interface for importing of Apache mod_rewrite rules
I’ve tested the URL Rewrite Module 2.0 – RC, and I’m very glad with what I’ve done. First, the installation is very easy. You have two choices to do that:
- With the “Microsoft Web Plateform Installer”: Download URL Rewrite Module 2.0 – RC: WebPI
- By launching the setup file:
Once it’s installed, a new icon appears in the IIS manager under the IIS section:
This extension allows you to create url rewriting:
- With a fully detailled form (regular expression, condition, …)
- By a wizard
- The url map (the static url)
- Blocking request
Let’s start with the wizard
=>For the lads who don’t like the regular expression, I’m putting my 2 cents that you’ll love it 
Really simple, copy the non rewritten url (like http://adventureworks.spgael.poc/Pages/Category.aspx?cat=Adventure Works Catalog&category=Boots) and paste it in the first textbox. On it, the module will generate a populated dropdown list with a couple of different templates. On the template selection, you’ll have your regular expression, pretty cool isn’t it?
Result:
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