Trying to move my traffic from widget.ca to widget.com

301 redirects with CNAME aliases

[lgn]

I have two domains names

widgets.ca and widgets.com

Both these names are CNAME alias that point to the same webserver and same content. (ie. widgets.ca/purplewidgets.html and widgets.com/purplewidgets.html are the same file in the same directory path on the same server)

Traffic is evenly split between the two domain names.

We wish to redirect all our .ca traffic to the .com domain for two reasons.

1) We want to look as American as possible to increase our American conversion rate.

2) The top 100 sites we are now using will not count a vote from a domain name that is different from our registered name. Thus we are penalized in the voting ladder.

I hear that a 301 redirect will create an infinite loop if you try to redirect a domain rather than a file. and meta refreshes will get you in trouble with google.

Anyways, how do I force the user from widget.ca to widget.com when they type widget.ca without getting the search engines upset.

PS: Our ISP is using IIS 5.0 on an Windows 2000 server, not Apache on Unix or Linux, to complicate matters.

[lgn]

Ok i did some of my own research and came up with this.

The contents of www.widgets.ca/default.asp contains this

Response.Status = "301 Permanent Redirect"
Response.Redirect "http://www.widgets.com/newpage.htm"
Response.End

However when I try this on my website (with a test page)and use the webmaster server header check utility, I get the dreaded 302 moved instead of the 301 message.

Help...

[DaveAtIFG]

One way is to use the Server Header Checker [webmasterworld.com] utility WebmasterWorld provides. ;)

[lgn]

Yes that is giving me the 302 message.

How do I force the ASP or my server to generate
the 301 message.

[lgn]

Found the problem:

This is the proper way of writing 301 redirects with ASP.

Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.widgets.com/index.html"
Response.End

Now how long will it take before google replaces the old widgets.ca with the widgets.com in the url line of the google listing.

Is that done with a fresh bot (soon) or with a deep crawl (to infinity and beyond).

[lgn]

Ok, now Im getting worried.

Freshbot was by last night and all my competitors
was freshbot'ed. I was not.

My content has changed, and my site was up.

Im getting woried that I might be dropped.

[crowthercm]

I'm not sure if this is helpful or not but what about using some sort of intelligent tracking and redirection for the two sites?

Instead of directing all your traffic from the .ca domain to the .com domain, why don't you direct traffic based upon where the query is coming from? If someone types in widgets.ca from the US, just automatically redirect them to the widgets.com (and vice versa?). You might even find it worth your while to add some country based content.