That's brutal!  I've seen something like that happen watching the HTTP responses via httpfox sometimes, where I've made a change on the server to a redirection and not seeing it in the browser.

Good, I'm glad you got this all working.  MC

Sounds like something in a web.config file.  Is there possibly a web.config file in a higher-level folder?

Or, perhaps there's an IIS plugin that you're using that is doing this?

Yes, that looks to me like 2 clues that both say that the web.config isn't being read for some reason.

If your default document is index.asp, and you're redirecting index.asp to /, then I would expect you'd get an infinite redirection loop.

You're pretty much on track with this now.  The key points are:

• nothing outside of your web config file should be aware of what your home page's file name actually is
• Googlebot, your menu, etc. should all see your home page as /
• any existing links to index.asp should be 301 redirected to / to consolidate the link juice

And, the reason you're renaming index.asp to something else is that otherwise you'd have an infinite redirection loop of index.asp -> / -> gets resolved to index.asp -> / -> ....

I'll second Mike's comment about using Screaming Frog to test immediately.

The only thing I'll add is that it's worth doing an httpfox test of one example page to make sure you don't have a chain of redirects from your combinations of rules--Screaming Frog will just show you 1 of the response codes per page (it's unclear to me if it's the first or the the last response code).  You'll catch things like one of the redirects in the chain being a 302 not a 301 (for instance, a basic Response.Redirect in the ASP code itself does a 302, not a 301!).

You can thoroughly test these your self using the Firefox plugin httpfox.

The advantage this particular tool has over pretty much everything else is that you see not only the LAST http response code, but the entire chain.

I've answered private Q&A questions here from people where Google was seeing one of the response codes in the chain, but other tools were seeing a different one.  If I remember correctly, it was a chain of 301s and 302s.

You want (ideally) a SINGLE 301; if you cannot make that happen, then a chain of 301s, with no 302s or 404s in the middle.

FYI you'll want to rename index.asp to something else, and then change the default document to point to the new filename (e.g. "home.asp"), then 301 redirect index.asp to /.  This will consolidate any link juice currently going to index.asp onto your one real home page, "/".

When you think you're all done, then use the Firefox plugin HTTPfox to see your entire HTTP response code stream when you hit index.asp, the non-www version of your site, etc.  You're looking to see a single 301 redirect for each.

Mike is correct.  You've got 2 separate problems here.  I actually wrote articles on these for About Us here and here.