Paul Ulvinius Blog

I had some issues with the HTTP Redirect functionality that came out of the box in my IIS 7.5. I started off trying to make a permanent redirect from paululvinius.se to paululvinius.se/blog. That ended me up in an infinite redirect loop that from what I can understand lots of people are having problems with.

So instead of paululvinius.se/blog, I ended up at paululvinius.se/blog/blog/blog/blog/… etc. until the browser decided that I’d gone crazy and stopped. I could clearly see in Fiddler2 that it added one more /blog for each try. After some tweaking with the settings (there aren’t that many), I gave up and gave URL Rewrite a try, and I must say, it’s already on my “must have” –list.

Once installed on your web server, open IIS and click on your website and you’ll now find URL Rewrite. It obviously starts with an empty list, but after playing around a bit, here is what I ended up with.

The good news is that the top 3 ones are already defined in one of the pre-built rules, you just have to add them. Just hit “Add Rule(s)” and this is what you’ll see…

So the 3 pre-defined ones I was talking about are the highlighted ones above. I found them all usable, and the only one that isn’t self describing is the “Canonical domain name” one, which basically lets you force the presence (or absence) of the “www”-part in your URL. I decided to go with http://www.paululvinius.se as oppose to http://paululvinius.se. It doesn’t really matter what way you swing here, the point is to be consistent.

The SEO rules helps you provide clearer directions to search engines, making it easier for your site to climb in rank.

But over to the thing that I was originally set out to fix. In order to make a rule that redirects users that lands on the root level (paululvinius.se/) to the /blog sub directory, start with a new “Blank rule”. Pick the one under “Inbound rules”, and fill in the form like this:

Make sure you don’t miss the “Does NOT Match the Pattern”, since that’s not the default choice here.

Finally I wanted to get rid of the annoying “/default.aspx” part that somehow often finds its way into links all around the internet. So if you follow a link to http://www.paululvinius.se/blog/default.aspx, you get redirected to http://www.paululvinius.se/blog. And when the search engines try to do the same, they get told that the redirection is a permanent one, giving them the hint for future references.

Here is the rule for this last one:

Enjoy!

IIS, SEO