301 Redirect with index.asp

[MichaelC-15022]

I'll second Mike's comment about using Screaming Frog to test immediately.

The only thing I'll add is that it's worth doing an httpfox test of one example page to make sure you don't have a chain of redirects from your combinations of rules--Screaming Frog will just show you 1 of the response codes per page (it's unclear to me if it's the first or the the last response code).  You'll catch things like one of the redirects in the chain being a 302 not a 301 (for instance, a basic Response.Redirect in the ASP code itself does a 302, not a 301!).

[MichaelC-15022]

You're pretty much on track with this now.  The key points are:

• nothing outside of your web config file should be aware of what your home page's file name actually is
• Googlebot, your menu, etc. should all see your home page as /
• any existing links to index.asp should be 301 redirected to / to consolidate the link juice

And, the reason you're renaming index.asp to something else is that otherwise you'd have an infinite redirection loop of index.asp -> / -> gets resolved to index.asp -> / -> ....

[TroyW]

Excellent Info

thanks

[TroyW]

Sorry for the delay in response, had another fire to deal with....

Anyway I put this in place and it just doesn't seem to work, i.e.

1. if I put in lucid8.com I would expect it to correct itself to www.lucid8.com or http://www.lucid8.com however instead it just opens the page and keeps lucid8.com in the URL.   Any ideas here?

2. I also notice that from that point on when I click to navigate to another place on the site that the URL stays without the www and I am going to guess that is because some of the pages have ABSOLUTE paths, i.e. www.lucid8.com/purchase/login.asp while others are relative, i.e /purchase/login.asp

So I guess two questions here i.e.

A: any idea how to track down why the redirect in the web.config is not working?

B: if we get # 1 working will it solve the # 2 issue or do we need to change all relative paths to absolute?

thanks

[TroyW]

Sorry for the delayed response, been buried putting out other fires.  That said

1. The web.config  has the following in place so it refers to /

<rewritemaps><rewritemap name="Redirect"><add key="/index.asp" value="/"></add></rewritemap></rewritemaps>

2. All of my menu systems and links now reference the home page as www.lucid8.com or as / which I assume should not be an issue?

3. The only issue outstanding is your recommendation to

A: copy index.asp to home.asp

B: then would I strip the entire contents from index.asp and put some type of code within to tell it to look at home.asp?  if so any help you have here would be appreciated.

NOTE:  I am still a bit lost as to why I would have to do 3.a & b since steps 1 & 2 would seem to resolve the issue, but perhaps I am missing a critical point?

[MichaelC-15022]

If your default document is index.asp, and you're redirecting index.asp to /, then I would expect you'd get an infinite redirection loop.

[TroyW]

Hmm well no all seems to be working well here, although the code in the web.config doesn't seem to be working for redirects, i.e. I can put in lucid8.com and it does not change to www.lucid8.com so maybe its not picking up the changes in web.config?

[MichaelC-15022]

Yes, that looks to me like 2 clues that both say that the web.config isn't being read for some reason.

[TroyW]

Yup something very strange.   So it appears that

1. the redirect code in the web.config does not work

2. I may have something else going on because whenever I enter lucid8.com it redirects to https://www.lucid8.com so wondering if you have any ideas as to how I might track down WHAT exactly is making the page change to from Lucid8.com to https://www.lucid8.com???

[MichaelC-15022]

Sounds like something in a web.config file.  Is there possibly a web.config file in a higher-level folder?

Or, perhaps there's an IIS plugin that you're using that is doing this?

[TroyW]

ok so I figured out a workaround since it appears that because I am on IIS6 the web.config is a but finicky aka may or may not work for redirection.  Anyway I used the information in this link http://johnnycode.com/2012/01/04/in-iis6-http-301-redirect-from-non-www-to-www/ to create a now non-www site and point it to the www site and all seems to be working well, expect if a person puts in a HTTPS within the WWW but that should be a really rare event so I am not going to hassle with it.    I also got rid of the relative URLS on the website and made them all explicit.

Fingers crossed that next run will show this issue is cleaned up....

Thanks for all your help and patience

[MichaelC-15022]

Good, I'm glad you got this all working.  MC

[TroyW]

Hey thought that I would also mention that the issue where it was referring from Lucid8.com to Https://Lucid8.com was actually a bug in firefox.  Apparently FF has a bug where IF you ever went to say Https://Lucid8.com in the past, even though you enter lucid8.com it will autocorrect upon submission and send you to Https://Lucid8.com

They say that removing the HTTPS items from history will fix it, but in my case it did not and instead I had to export all my bookmarks, kill off the profile and then import the bookmarks again and now all is well.

[MichaelC-15022]

That's brutal!  I've seen something like that happen watching the HTTP responses via httpfox sometimes, where I've made a change on the server to a redirection and not seeing it in the browser.

[TroyW]

Yeah a major pain and went round and round since it was happening on all machines.  Once I got a machine that didn't do it it got me thinking..

Anyway hope it helps others in the future