Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
DNS vs IIS redirection
-
I'm working on a project where a site has gone through a rebrand and is therefore also moving to a new domain name. Some pages have been merged on the new site so it's not a lift and shift job and so I'm writing up a redirect plan.
Their IT dept have asked if we want redirects done by DNS redirect or IIS redirect. Which one will allow us to have redirects on a page level and not a domain level?
I think IIS may be the right route but would love your thoughts on this please.
-
If you are not changing the IP address you don't need to change the DNS, if you change the IP address, in addition to updating the DNS records you also need to properly redirect traffic from old urls to new urls.
With IIS the best option is using url rewrite, which is very flexible but a little tricky to set up if it's the first time you do so: http://www.iis.net/learn/extensions/url-rewrite-module/creating-rewrite-rules-for-the-url-rewrite-module
Url rewrite does operate at web server level, its powerful and does the job, but you may consider doing redirects at application level, depending on the technology you use, php/dotnet/aspx/mvc you have different tools. The advantage of doing it at application level is you can redirect dynamically, in other words use an algo to translate the old urls to the new ones using whatever information is stored in the application cache, database, and so on. While using IIS url rewrite you either statically redirect each old url to a the new url or you use regular expressions or wildcards to dynamically do so. In other words using url rewrite you have a little less flexibility.
-
Within IIS you use the IIS Manager. Here's a blog on page-by-page: http://www.proworks.com/blog/2010/02/11/adding-a-301-redirect-in-iis-for-individual-pages-with-non-aspx-extensions/ It's older but still applicable.
There's also software available like ISAPI_rewrite that can help with the process if you're migrating between Apache and Windows servers: http://www.helicontech.com/isapi_rewrite
The Windows doc on this: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/6b855a7a-0884-4508-ba95-079f38c77017.mspx?mfr=true
-
Thank you very much. What file would manage page by page or directory by directory redirects on an IIS server?
-
It sounds like you're talking about CNAME vs a 301 redirect.
DNS can't really "redirect", at least in the SEO sense. A CNAME DNS entry acts as a pointer to another site. Sooner or later you have to have an A record to act as the "glue" between yourdomain.com and an IP where it can be accessed. The problem is that yourdomain.com is the end result. So even if it is just a CNAME for loadbalancer.abc.some.cloud.com, it will be seen as yourdomain.com by both the browser and any robots that visit.
A 301 redirect is an actual instruction (HTTP response code) from the web server (IIS in your case) to the end browser, saying that yourdomain.com really belongs over at anotherdomain.com. At that point your browser (or crawling robot) goes to the new domain. This is considered the proper SEO way to redirect anything, as it is known that robots respect the 301 response and most SEO benefits that the previous link had will flow through the 301 to your new page.
-
Hi
If I understand them correctly....
DNS change would be the location for site x is now at this IP. (IP Location Change)
IIS change would be server y is now server x. (Hardware Location Change)
In which case an IIS change would likely be preferred as you don't have to wait for the new DNS update to propagate.
Hope that helps,
Don
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
WPEngine Causing Redirect Chain
Hi guys, Had a quick question that I wanted to verify here. After reviewing a Moz report we received some redirect chain error on all of our sites hosted with WPEngine. We noticed that the redirect chain appears to be coming from how the domains are configured in their control panel. Essentially, there is a redirect: from staging/temp -> to live from non-www -> to www SSL redirect from http -> https The issue here is that the non-www is redirecting to www and then redirected again to https://www According to support the only way to get rid of this error is to drop the www version of the domain and to host everything under https://domain.com. To me it seems very odd that you cannot just go from http://non-www to https://www in just 1 301 redirect. Has anyone else experienced this or am I just not looking at the situation correctly?
Technical SEO | | AaronHenry0 -
Redirect non slash to slash
Hello SEO gurus We have an issue here ( www.xyz.com.au) is having 200 responses www.xyz.com.au and www.xyz.com.au/ ( when i ran the crawl test i found this ) We have been advised to do a 301 from non slash to slash ( as our other pages are showing up with slash ) for the consistency we decided to go with this but our devs just couldnt do it. Error is - redirect loop and this site is a wordpress one Can anyone help us with this issue? Help is much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Pack0 -
Best & easiest way to 301 redirect on IIS
Hi all, What is the best and easiest way to 301 redirect URLs on IIS server? I got access to the FTP and WordPress back office, but no access to the server admin. Is there an easy way to create 301 redirect without having to always annoy the tech in charge of the server? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | 2MSens0 -
301 redirect relative or absolute path?
Hello everyone, Recently we've changed the URL structure on our website, and of course we had to 301 redirect the old urls to the coresponding new ones. The way the technical guys did this is: "http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "/new-url.html"
Technical SEO | | Silviu
meaning as a relative redirect path, not an absolute one like this:
"http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "http://www.domain.com/new-url.html" This happened for few thousands urls, and the fact is the organic traffic dropped for those pages after this change. (no other changes were made on these pages and the new urls are as seo friendly as possible, A grade on On-Page Grader). The question is: does the relative redirect negatively affects seo, or it counts the same as an absolute path redirect? Thanks,
S.0 -
How do I fix a 301 Redirect Loop?
Saturday I waas doing some correcting of some duplicate titles, including nofollowing tags, etc. (my main problem was duplicate titles due to tags and categories being indexed). Now this morning I see that one of my pages refuses to load, citing a 301 redirect loop. http://www.incredibleinfant.com/feeding/switching-baby-formula/ Originally, the page was posted under the wrong category. http://www.incredibleinfant.com/uncategorized/switching-baby-formula I resaved it under the correct category (feeding) and now it won't load. Can someone help me figure out how to correct this mess? Thanks so much Heather
Technical SEO | | Gotmoxie0 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
Singular vs plural in urls
In keyword research for an ecommerce site, I've found that widget, singular gets a lot more searches than widgets, plural AND is much less competitive. Is it better for SEO purposes to have the URLs (and matching title tags) in the catalog as /brass-widget.html, /steel-widget.html, etc., or /brass-widgets.html, etc.? I'm worried that a) searches for widgets will pass by the singular urls but not vice versa, and b) the singular form will strike visitors as bad grammar. Any advice?
Technical SEO | | AmericanOutlets0 -
301 Redirect vs Domain Alias
We have hundreds of domains which are either alternate spelling of our primary domain or close keyword names we didn't want our competitor to get before us. The primary domain is running on a dedicated Windows server running IIS6 and set to a static IP. Since it is a static IP and not using host headers any domain pointed to the static IP will immediately show the contents of the site, however the domain will be whatever was typed. Which could be the primary domain or an alias. Two concerns. First, is it possible that Google would penalize us for the alias domains or dilute our primary domain "juice"? Second, we need to properly track traffic from the alias domains. We could make unique content for those performing well and sell or let expire those that are sending no traffic. It's not my goal to use the alias domains to artificially pump up our primary domain. We have them for spelling errors and direct traffic. What is the best practice for handling one or both of these issues?
Technical SEO | | briankb0