forwarding old aspx pages to static html pages

[jordan5150]

I have an old site that has been running for some time and the company has decided to change their main domain name. There are links to the old pages all over google. The old domain has been set up as a host header to the new domain. Here is what I would like to do(for example...there are many pages like this). The link [old-domain.com...] to forward to [new-domain.com...] so they are more apt to find content they are looking for. I have tried to use custom 404 settings (my host is using IIS 4) but when the request for old-domain.com comes it it does not get out of that domain but rather tries to load as www.old-domain.com/events/index.html which does not exist so the end user still gets a 404 error. I hope I have explained my situation well enough. Help is appreciated.

[g1smd]

Whatever you do, never include the index file filename in any link or in any redirection. You would be setting yourself up for a duplicate content problem right from the start.

Link to "www.domain.com/" or to "/" only.

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You'll need ISAPI_Rewrite and you will need to test for requests for the old domain and issue a 301 redirect to the URL you really want the user to see in that case. If your server used Apache, then this would be very easy to do. It is a bit more tricky in IIS; hopefully someone else can send you off to a decent tutorial.

[jordan5150]

Is it really all that. I am new to this but my hosting company is very willing to work with me. I simply want my old domain to forward to my new domain. It is basically the same site but much of the old content is gone. I have the domain forwarding but when it tries to forward an entire link it gets tripped up. Can I not just have everything that goes to the old domain go to a redirect script.

[g1smd]

You could, but the script must always return a HTTP Response Code of 301 for all requested URLs on the old domain.

[jordan5150]

Sorry...I dont understand. I dont see a 301 in IIS

[pageoneresults]

To do this properly and efficiently you'll need a program like ISAPI_Rewrite on the server where your site is hosted. You'll want to map those old pages to the appropriate new pages. Any pages that are gone "permanently" should return a 410 gone or a 404 not found. Keep in mind that if a 404 is returned, the spiders will continue to index for a period of time before removing the pages. A 410 (for those who follow it) will present a 410 gone response which should stop the bot from requesting the pages on revisits.

As g1smd states above, you'll need to configure your rewrite to return a 301 response for the old URIs to the new URIs.