If you are reading posts about “Google’s Duplicate Content Penalty” in reference to sites that your site could be reached at www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com, with the common remedy of using a 301-redirect, but run your site on IIS, this article is for you. The 301 code cited was undoubtedly Apache-targeted, in the form of a sample htaccess file and which isn’t really applicable to you.
In terms of options for 301-redirects on IIS, what I found on the web was interesting:
1) Pure IIS based redirects (via the IIS MMC Snap-in and the metabase)
2) ISAPI Redirect Filters – seemless integration into the webserver itself
3) ASP (woohoo!)
For IIS based redirects, the problem (if you don’t want to pay for an ISAPI filter) is that not only do you need admin-access-with-GUi-shell to the server, but you also had to create a separate instantiation of each site, one with the 301-redirect, and then another with the real site. Doubling up the instantiations could press the limits of the metabase on 200+ domain servers (and this is for 2GHz 1GB RAM machines). We could solve the admin-access-with-GUi-shell with some swift ADSi code, but why bother?
In walked the solution:
http://evolvedcode.net/content/code_relocated/
This website is trully a resource for people doing ASP code, and highly recommend reading through his other articles. Evolved Code’s samples will need som extensions for proper 301 redirects if you are handling more than one page that needs this functionality, but it will definitely get you started.
Another site with good example code for .NET is:
http://www.kevinleitch.co.uk/wp/?p=218
Happy Redirecting!
