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)
- 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”.
- 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
- 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…
Ironically, the “for more information” at the end that points to IIS documentation is broken. 😉