I look after the online marketing for a site that has the following setup:
parts of the website are written in .Net/.aspx. Only those pages that require server side coding (e.g. or sending e-mail) are dynamic.
the rest of the pages are written in html

the web server is Microsoft IIS


The website designer believes that to setup a 301 redirect to solve the canonicalisation issue would involve implementing a solution that can only be done by the ISP.

Now I know if it was an asp.net or Apache configuration you could make the changes yourself.

I have two questions:
1. What impact would a 301 redirect have a the website that is using both aspx and html?
2. If a website is using a Microsoft IIS web server does the ISP have to implement a 301 redirect?

Any help much appreciated :-)

Does the moderator have any opinion on this question?

I'm not an expert, but I have recently run into a similar issue.

The website designer believes that to setup a 301 redirect to solve the canonicalisation issue would involve implementing a solution that can only be done by the ISP.

Now I know if it was an asp.net or Apache configuration you could make the changes yourself.

Didn't you say that some of the pages were already done in ASP.NET? If so, why not do it yourself?

Let me tell you what I did. I redesigned a site in .NET that was not originally optimized at all (intentionally) only to find out later that some pages did indeed have some ranking for some keywords. This was by accident of course, but nevertheless they had some ranking that was not realized before. Since the pages were no longer there and I wanted to be able to capture traffic for those keywords, I created an 404 error page that took the header, stripped off everything but the directory and page name and then did a switch/case comparison and redirected, using the 301 redirect, to the appropriate new page. All of this was done in .NET. It works beautifully.


I have two questions:
1. What impact would a 301 redirect have a the website that is using both aspx and html?
2. If a website is using a Microsoft IIS web server does the ISP have to implement a 301 redirect?

1. I believe it shouldn't have any impact. As far as I know, a 301 redirect is a 301 redirect no matter if it's HTML, .NET, or PHP. The manner of incorporating the redirect is different for the different technologies, but the end result is the same.

2. This all depends on your level of configuration access to the server your ISP is hosting on. If they give you full configuration access, your ISP doesn't need to do anything. If they don't give you access to configure your site, then they will probably need to be involved if you want to implement something like I did. Somehow, that 404 error will need to get rerouted.

Maybe someone with more experience can chime in and correct me if I'm wrong.

Hope this helps.

JEC