Help with setting up 301 redirects from /default.aspx to the "/" in ASP.NET using MasterPages?

[TisBest]

Hi SEOMoz Moderators and Staff,

My web developer and I are having a world of trouble setting up the best way to 301 redirect from www.tisbest.org/default.aspx to the www.tisbest.org since we're using session very heavily for our ASP.NET using MasterPages.  We're hoping for some help since our homepage has dropped 50+ positions for all of our search terms since our first attempt at setting this up 10 days ago.  = (  A very bad result.

We've rolled back the redirects after realizing that our session system was redirecting www.tisbest.org back to www.tisbest.org/default.aspx?AutoDetectCookieSupport=1 which would redirect to a URL with the session ID like this one: http://www.tisbest.org/(S(whukyd45tf5atk55dmcqae45))/Default.aspx which would then redirect again and throw the spider into an unending redirect loop.  The Google gods got angry, stopped indexing the page, and we are now missing from our previous rankings though, thankfully, several of our other pages do still exist on Google.

So, has anyone dealt with this issue?  Could this be solved by simply resetting up the 301 redirects and also configuring ASP.NET to recognize Google's spider as supporting cookies and thus not serving it the Session ID that has caused issue for us in the past?

Any help (even just commiserating!) would be great.  Thanks!  Chad

[BrianCrouch]

What was causing the session ID to form a URL (page) structure like that? It should append to the page URL  dynamically "?=(S(whukyd45tf5atk55dmcqae45)" Has that been fixed?

Here's something that may help:

• Wherever possible, avoid the use of session IDs in URLs. Consider using cookies instead.

• Whenever possible, shorten URLs by trimming unnecessary parameters.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76329