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IIS Software Engineering

Permanent 301 Redirect with QueryString in IIS

If anyone’s ever tried to move domain, you’ll know its a pain. One way to make things a little easier is to provide an automatic 301 redirect from your old domain to your new one – this marks the new destination as a permanent change, and will generally be picked up by search engines.

IIS provides an easy way to do this – but it’s not immediately obvious how to get it to forward querystrings too – for instance, if you wanted to forward developerfusion.com/show.aspx?id=20 to developerfusion.co.uk/show.aspx?id=20. Here’s now! (This works in both IIS 5 and IIS 6)

  1. Go into the IIS site properties for the domain you’re moving from. In the “Home Directory” tab, click the option “A redirection to a URL”.
  2. In the Redirect to box, enter the domain you wish to move to (no trailing slash), plus $S$Q – for example, http://www.developerfusion.com$S$Q
  3. Next, check the options that state the client will be sent to “The exact URL entered above”, and “A permanent redirection for this resource”

And that’s it! Now, what does this $S$Q do? These are basically tags that IIS will automatically replace – $S will be replaced with the subdirectory location (such as /images/show.aspx) and $Q will be replaced with the querystring (such as ?id=30).

You might be wondering why we can’t just use $Q, and then turn off “The exact URL entered above” – but in this situation,you get your domain name,then the query string, and *then* the subdirectory location – which probably isn’t what you wanted! For more information, check out this.

2 replies on “Permanent 301 Redirect with QueryString in IIS”

Oh, this is brilliant (as they say in the UK -right?) This is exactly what I wanted for my website which has various domain names. I want everyone to start bookmarking just one of the domain names in case we decide to start getting rid of the old ones…

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