Potential issue with SEO redirection and 301 Redirects

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NC Software
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Potential issue with SEO redirection and 301 Redirects

Post by NC Software » Fri Feb 22, 2013 8:35 am

Yes, I'm still using AC "RUST" (7.0.7)

A problem occurred to me this week as I was doing some working bringing an old licensing server back online for reactivating old products for some clients. The licensing server got moved to its own site so I wouldn't have to deal with web.config inheritance and other issues I had. The former licensing server was a virtual directory under my main AC site so I had to put that back in place. As I had issues with the .NET 2.0 sub site and web.config inheritance (which I later solved) I tried using the SEO dynamic URL to sneakily redirect the activation to the new licensing server URL as the URL is hard coded in the app's licensing system. In that process as you know your SEO redirects reply with a 301 permanent moved response. By the way .NET 4. offers a method now "RedirectPermanent" which does all that you do in your code - FYI.

Well, somewhere that 301 redirect got cached and after removing the SEO dynamic link it was still returning a 301 to the caller. I guess it's in some DNS cache somewhere as the SEO dynamic link was removed and cache cleared in the AC site. I tried running ipconfig /flushdns on the system and that still didn't stop the 301 from being found in the call, so it may be cached externally, I use Google's public DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) for my DNS servers on my PC's.

So having learned this and if it's true that 301 gets cached out of our control, it really raises a RED flag to me to use 301 redirects. Let's say you use the SEO dynamic links that reply with a 301 and later NOT use them. Your raw URL's won't work, the client/caller will get a 301 whether the store's link is valid or not. If this is true, I say again as I've said about a year ago when I preferred to use IIS 7.5's URL redirect system but had issues with it, do like they do and allow the option of the response. I personally do NOT want a 301 returned. I just want a response.redirect action. Just retarget. Now if I ever need to regress my URL's and I'm stuck with 301's I'm pooched and people won't be able to view my products with the "former" URL.

Thoughts???
Neal Culiner
NC Software, Inc.

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