Windows – How to 301 redirect a single file or directory on a GoDaddy shared Windows hosting plan

301-redirectgodaddyredirectwindows

I've seen a few posts about redirecting domains on GoDaddy, but nothing about single files.

In my case I am using a Windows shared host, so I can't use any IIS management tools. What I'm hoping is that I can do something equivalent to Apache's .htaccess file to configure redirects for single files.

Alternatively, is there an HTML document I can return that performs the same function as an HTTP 301 redirect?

I should point out that I am using plain HTML served from the disk, so I cannot return a custom HTTP response code as I might be able to with say PHP, ASP.NET, ASP, etc.

GoDaddy's documentation does not cover this situation.

EDIT

So user78940's answer shows a viable technique (GoDaddy support <rewrite> in Web.config), however despite reading a few different tutorials on this config element I'm still having trouble getting it to work.

Firstly, I'm using virtual hosting which means I have this physical folder structure:

root                      < -- used for primarysite.com
    - drewnoakes.com      < -- nested virtual hosting
    - someothersite.com   < -- nested virtual hosting

There are three websites here. The root is for primarysite.com, the subdirs are for the correspondingly named sites. This is just how you have to do it with GoDaddy unfortunately. You always have one primary then nest sites there.

Unfortunately the GoDaddy setup gives a redirect if you don't put a trailing slash on a URL (to access the default document of that folder) which means:

http://drewnoakes.com/code/exif (no trailing slash)

…gets redirected to…

http://drewnoakes.com/drewnoakes.com/code/exif/ (with trailing slash)

This means that Google has both URLs in its index. I want to tidy this situation up, making the former redirect properly and the latter redirect to the canonical form so that I don't suffer page-rank dilution and my URLs are ~~less embarrassing~~ easier to remember.

I tried this config, but it ended up with an infinite 301-redirect loop:

<rewrite>
  <rewriteMaps>
    <rewriteMap name="StaticRedirects">
      <add key="/drewnoakes.com/code/exif/" value="/code/exif/" />
    </rewriteMap>
  </rewriteMaps>
  <rules>
    <rule name="RedirectRule" stopProcessing="true">
      <match url=".*" />
      <conditions>
        <add input="{StaticRedirects:{REQUEST_URI}}" pattern="(.+)" />
      </conditions>
      <action type="Redirect" url="{C:1}" appendQueryString="False" redirectType="Permanent" />
    </rule>
  </rules>
</rewrite>

So, how can I configure IIS wildcard redirects for this scenario using the <rewrite> configuration element?

Best Answer

The <meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH"....> method will return a 200 response (not a true redirect response like 301/302/etc.).

Afaik Go Daddy has no feature in their control panel for redirecting only certain files on shared Windows accounts.

On a shared Windows plan you may be able to use IIS 7 URL rewriting via a web.config file put in the root of your website directory. You would have to confirm that your particular hosting account is on a IIS 7+ server. If so, add the following web.config file to perform a simple redirect:

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <rewrite>
            <rewriteMaps>
                <rewriteMap name="StaticRedirects">
                    <add key="/somedir/old-page.html" value="/otherdir/new-page.html" />
                </rewriteMap>
            </rewriteMaps>
            <rules>
                <rule name="RedirectRule" stopProcessing="true">
                    <match url=".*" />
                    <conditions>
                        <add input="{StaticRedirects:{REQUEST_URI}}" pattern="(.+)" />
                    </conditions>
                    <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.somedomain.com{C:1}" appendQueryString="False" redirectType="Permanent" />
                </rule>
            </rules>
        </rewrite>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

For more details you can see the "Using rewrite maps for redirection" section here: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/469/using-rewrite-maps-in-url-rewrite-module/

Related Solutions

Nginx unwanted location redirect with trailing slash

There's a special case where a proxy_pass with a location ending in / would result in an automatic implicit 301 redirect without going to the backend; you have to create an explicit location without the trailing slash to avoid this:

http://nginx.org/r/location

If a location is defined by a prefix string that ends with the slash character, and requests are processed by one of proxy_pass, fastcgi_pass, uwsgi_pass, scgi_pass, memcached_pass, or grpc_pass, then the special processing is performed. In response to a request with URI equal to this string, but without the trailing slash, a permanent redirect with the code 301 will be returned to the requested URI with the slash appended. If this is not desired, an exact match of the URI and location could be defined like this:
location /user/ {
    proxy_pass http://user.example.com;
}

location = /user {
    proxy_pass http://login.example.com;
}

E.g., you gotta create an explicit /pass location in addition to the existing /pass/ one, otherwise, an implicit location /pass {return 301 /pass/…;} will be created for you.

However, are you sure you actually want to do what you're trying to do? If you're going to omit a redirect from /pass to /pass/, then relative paths aren't going to work. Some newer browsers also have a tendency to feature defective UI/UX that may not present the trailing slash to the user, which may make things even more confusing when trying to troubleshoot the distinction.

Ubuntu – Apache2 – 301 Redirect when missing “/” at the end of directory in the url

Sending the data without a redirect would break relative links. If http://server/directory contains file, then the full URL for that would be http://server/directory/file. A link specified like <a href="file"> will point to http://server/directory/file if the base URL is http://server/directory/, but if the base URL was only http://server/directory it would point to http://server/file instead, which is not the intended result.

Apache could have generated the directory listing in two different ways depending on the URL instead of redirecting. However that would not work if there was an index.html file in the directory. So instead Apache is using the approach, that works in both cases.

This is not a new behavior, one decade ago Apache was behaving the same way. Clients which cannot handle a redirection should have been fixed by now. But for any clients who cannot handle a redirection, Apache should be sending along a tiny html file with a link that can be followed instead.

EDIT

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Nginx unwanted location redirect with trailing slash

Ubuntu – Apache2 – 301 Redirect when missing “/” at the end of directory in the url

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