IIS 7 redirect and rewrite for retired domain

Question

I have an old domain for a company that has merged with another company and they want to decommission the old site and redirect traffic to the new domain. OldCompany.com will now point to NewCompany.com. However, to keep their SEO rankings we also want to map the pages from the OldCompany.com domain to the corresponding pages on NewCompany.com.

I know it's possible to setup Rewrite Maps in IIS (I've done this), but if the OldCompany domain is now pointing to the NewCompany web server, but the site itself was not migrated, will I still be able to use rewrite rules in conjunction with redirects to point OldCompany.com/about.html to NewCompany.com/subDirectory/about.aspx?? Do I need to setup these pages in order to accomplish this? Will Rewrite rules work without the pages from the originating site in place?

Right now I am able to setup a HTTP Redirect for the entire OldCompany.com domain by just creating a new site in IIS and using the HTTP Redirect to do this. What I really want is the more granular solution outlined above, so that people get to the pages they are looking for and not just the new site's homepage.

Answer 1

You should not do the redirect with new site (in application level). This would just break any existing incoming links. Better approach is to redirect old domain (with the whole url path & query string that you may have) with 301 redirect and map all relevant old urls to urls in the new site.

Usually it's done with multiple steps:

• Tell Google Webmaster Tools the new domain address (in case you use that)
• Create IIS rewrite rule to redirect (with 301) old domain to the new domain, preserving path & query string info
• Create IIS rewrite rules (in your new site) to map any old url to the new structure, with permanent redirect (301) or redirect to same other page when user can move forward, if exact page is not found from the new structure.

This will tell Google that the URLs have changed and point to the new location.