ASP.NET 301 redirect

 

When moving your pages from one place to another it is very tempting to handle old inlinks by creating a simple Response.Redirect( sNewPage, true );

This sure will work, but this type of redirect is a 302 and is meant for temporary relocations of pages. But your pages are permanently moved and therefore you should use a 301 Moved Permanently status code. This should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page.

To solve it you could install some sort of redirect filter(ISAPI dll). I was looking into those type of solutions and found IISMods URL Rewrite Filter for IIS. 

Such a solution is very flexible and since it is a IIS filter it is possible to rewrite URL:s for all kind of filetypes, not only for aspx pages but say images (ex http://www.solutions4ever.net/*.gif could be transferred to http://www.hello.com/test/*gif ).

It is however not possible for everyone to install a ISAPI filter on their website, therefore I here present a solution on how you can achieve 301 redirects with pure ASP.NET code instead.

  In your old page you can write code such as

private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
 Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
 Response.AddHeader(“Location”,”http://www.solutions4ever.net”);
}

For me who wanted to redirect all calls to http://solutions4ever.net/articles/articles27.aspx to http://www.solutions4ever.net/articles/articles27.aspx  took and didn’t have to think about pictures, cause they were “base” linked with the application took the idea one step further.

I created a new web application to install on kbmentor.aspcode.net. Basically it only contains a global.asax which handles Application_BeginRequest like this:

  protected void Application_BeginRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e)
  {
   string sOldPath = HttpContext.Current.Request.Path.ToLower();
   

   string sPage = “http://www.solutions4ever.net/articles/” + sOldPath;
   Response.Clear();
   Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
   Response.AddHeader(“Location”,sPage);
   Response.End();
  }

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