301 redirect on Windows IIS. HELP! (Part 2)

[Jeepster]

My webmaster's trying (but struggling) to 301-redirect the non.www version of my site to the www version. He's following these instructions given to me in a response to an SEOMoz Private Question (ah, the good old days!).

So far he's 301-redirected the homepage but seems stuck on how to do the entire site. Any clues on what he should be doing?

[Jeepster]

He seems to have sorted it out now -- touch wood.
Thank you for your replies.

[jesse-landry]

Yeah and that's how you do it in IIS... Trust me I did this recently.

You create a site, say - domain.com (if you already have www.domain.com)

go into properties of domain.com and set the "A redirection to a URL" tab to www.domain.com, check permanent, and then it will send all requests to domain.com over to www.domain.com

Seriously that's the easiest way to do it I did these exact steps about 2 months ago and our site redirects perfectly, all pages. (setting the canonical version is setting a redirect in this scenario)

[ThompsonPaul]

He's not trying to redirect a file or directory, Jesse, he's trying to create the rewrite rule that will set the canonical version (all www or all non-www) for all pages on the site.

P.

[ThompsonPaul]

Those instructions are correct and should work for the whole site, Jeepster. Are you certain he's implementing them correctly? In particular  you need to be absolutely certain that he's selected the Canonical Domain rule template, not a blank rule that he's writing himself.

Also, have you confirmed that the resulting code appears in the site's web.config file as indicated in the tutorial?

If all that's been confirmed, I'd check with your hosting provider to see why there might be issues getting these configs applied to your site. (assuming it's not an unmanaged dedicated or VPS sever.)

Paul

[jesse-landry]

I'm not sure about all those fancy instructions in that link there... This is how I would do it, in a nutshell (correct me if I've missed a step as I do not have access to our IIS server at this time to retrace the steps, this is from memory)

1. Open IIS in Explorer and navigate to your site. Right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect and select Properties. (this will allow you to do it per directory, per page, etc)

2. In the file tab, select "A redirection to a URL" - (i may have missed a step here. i also know that depending on which IIS version you are running the location of this changes. I believe this is for IIS 7. Either way there will be an option somewhere in the called "A redirection to a URL")

3. Enter the url to redirect to

4. Determine whether you want to do the optional checkboxes (probably will want to check "A permanent redirection for this resource")

5. Click OK

   Hope this helps!