Hello,

We are in the process of migrating several old sites from Websphere (java) to .NET 2.0. The issue of 301 redirects recently came up and sparked some questions...

FYI - All of our old sites are on Websphere 5.0, and every page contains a .do extn. Our new sites are on .NET 2.0 with an .aspx extn.

Originally, we planned to have the .do extensions mapped as .NET pages in IIS. Which would allow us to implement a simple .NET 301 redirect (like it is suggested here: http://www.stevenhargrove.com/redirect-web-pages - scroll down to the section titled "301 Redirect Using ASP .NET").

However, this would involve us essentially recreating our old site (directory structure, file names, etc) and putting individual 301 redirects in place for each page.

As you might expect, when presented to our development team they pretty much flipped out. In general, they thought this was very tedious and all together a bad approach for handling 301 redirects.

So, their suggested approach was to create a more centralized 301 redirect process that could handle all inbound requests containing the old ".do" extn.


In their solution, all inbound requests to the site containing a ".do" extn would be given a 301 and sent to a page in the root folder of the web site: site.com/redirect.aspx.
Then, the /redirect.aspx file would (somehow) know what URL they had originally punched in and give them another 301 redirect to the actual destination page.
The advantage of this approach is that it is easier for the technical team to maintain (as there is one central file to update for all redirects). And, it doesn't clutter up the new site with a bunch of redirect pages.


Sounds great. Easier to maintain - I'm all for it. But, how would their approach affect Google? Is it acceptable to give "two" 301 responses to Googlebot? Could GB get confused and think that all .do pages should now point to /redirect.aspx? (Which essentially does the same thing as not implementing a 301 redirect at all... our traffic would plummet.)

Any thoughts or other suggested approaches for handling the 301 redirect would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

>We are in the process of migrating several old sites from Websphere

good move

>Our new sites are on .NET 2.0 with an .aspx extn.

Not as good. You have my sympathy

>Is it acceptable to give "two" 301 responses to Googlebot?

Maybe, maybe not. I wouldn’t. This is hardly a best-practices implementation.

>suggested approaches for handling the 301 redirect would be greatly appreciated

Tell them to get off their butts and do the 301s. Maybe have them do some reading on ISAPI if they cant figure out how to do it in .net/IIS

In general a redirection chain is a bad idea, but my answer hinges on one important point:

Would the URL at redirect.aspx contain extra parameters, depeding on the original page to be redirected?

If so, then that would be a separate indexable URL, and you might get away with a chain: A1 --> B1 --> C1 and A2 --> B2 --> C2 etc.

If not then you would have: A1 --> B --> C1 and A2 --> B --> C2; and search engines would not know how to handle that. B would seem to randomly redirect to other pages. Nothing would pass any PR on.

Again, I would recommend against a redirection chain. Simple to administer but unlikely to be beneficial, possibility to be harmful, to the search engines view of your site.