Redirecting Old Urls After Web Site Overhaul

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1247781

Question

We have a website which we recently migrated to ASP.NET MVC. All of the URLs are now different from the original website. Google still has all of our old URLs, so if anyone finds us in a search, currently they will get a 404.

I have a catchall route that catches bad URLs, including all of the old ones. In a perfect world I would like to do a 301 redirect to the home page for all urls matching this catchall route, and I do have code for this that works properly on my development machine. However, I finally got someone at our ISP (Network Solutions) to tell me that they block 301 redirections (the web server returns a 404 instead).

So I think my only remaining option is to just accept any bad URL, and point it to the home page.

Here is my question: I know that the search engines (especially Google) are now penalizing duplicate content. If I just point all bad URLs to the home page, how much is this going to hurt us in the search rankings? Do I have any other technical options?

Was it helpful?

Solution

Honestly, I would suggest that you change ISP's. 301's are an important tool in any webmaster's toolbox, and for them to block that will penalize you terribly. You could easily transfer your domain to another IP address, wait for the DNS propagation, and then do your rollout.

From Google's Webmaster tools:

Use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect all pages on your old site to your new site. This tells search engines and users that your site has permanently moved. We recommend that you move and redirect a section or directory first, and then test to make sure that your redirects are working correctly before moving all your content.

Don't do a single redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it's not a good user experience. It's more work, but a page-to-page redirect will help preserve your site's ranking in Google while providing a consistent and transparent experience for your users. If there won't be a 1:1 match between pages on your old site and your new site (recommended), try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.

I'm sure that's much easier said then done, but I would never want an ISP that exerted that kind of filter against their clients.

OTHER TIPS

Can you do a 302 redirect at least? I do agree with what womp says though, what ISP would block 301 redirects? Dump them. ISPs are a dime a dozen.

I completely agree with womp. I cannot believe that an ISP would block 301's.

I was so surprised that you can't do a 301 redirect on Network Solutions, because they're not exactly a two bit operation.

Their own marketing material suggests that you can. There's also a forum post by someone wanting to do a 301 redirect. Although they use a .htaccess, the reply from a Network Solutions tech support shows the user how to do a 301 redirect in ASP.

If you opt to not change ISP then the simples solution is to display a page where you say that the page has been moved with a link to the new page link, then you add a 5 second delay that re-directs using a HTML meta tag:

<html>
<head>
<title>Page moved</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url=http://example.com/newurl">
</head>
<body>
The page has been moved, click <a href="http://example.com/newurl">here</a> if you have not been re-directed to the new page within 5 seconds.
</body>
</html>

Alternatively you could use a URL rewriter, that way the old url "points" to the new page, there are basically two ways of doing this, the programmatically way is to create your own VirtualPathProvider, the second way is to use a URL Rewriter module like the IIS Url Rewrite Module.

Licensed under: CC-BY-SA with attribution
Not affiliated with StackOverflow
scroll top