Which redirect method is best?

IIS redirect or scripting

[katy8439]

Hi All,

I have a client who has 4 domain names. These currently point to one website however Google is indexing them individually e.g.

widgets.co.uk/default.asp
my-widgets.co.uk/default.asp
widgets.com/default.asp
my-widgets.com/default.asp

Their new SEO company wants to redirect all pages to widgets.co.uk to (understandably) avoid duplicate content issues

I know that I can do this on each domain name in IIS using the redirect method of:

widgets.co.uk$S$Q

But I was wondering if there was any advantage of placing a response.redirect on the individual pages of the site that have been indexed by Google over redirecting the domain name?

Your thoughts would be appreciated! Thanks in advance

Katy

[tedster]

No advantage, so do the simple thing -- set up the redirect in Internet Services Manager and use the $S$Q variable to preserve both the full url and query string.

Definitely make sure you check the box that says "A permanent redirection for this resource" -- or else you will get a 302 http header instead of the 301 that you need. This is a common oversight on Windows IIS Servers.

[katy8439]

Thanks Tedster. I had a feeling that it wouldn't make much difference but I thought I'd better check!

[g1smd]

As long as all the "wrong" URLs supply a 301 HTTP status code along with a pointer to the correct URL for that page, then it doesn't matter how you implement that. Using the IIS Control Panel, however, will be much quicker to implement and much easier to manage.

One extra thing. Never include the actual index file filename in any link on your site. End the URL with a trailing / after the domain name or after the folder name. This avoids another form of duplicate content.

Make sure that you cater for both the www and non-www versions of all of the domains too.

The redirects must NOT be chained. You should be able to get from A to X, and from B to X, and from C to X, in just one move each time. You must not go from A to B to X. That sort of redirection chain can kill your listings dead.