Using IIS Rewrite URL for SEO to move all Cold Fusion CFM pages to ASP aspx pages

Question

I am moving a large database driven website from coldfusion .cfm to .net aspx. I am pretty much finished now, but I need to do 301 redirects on all the coldfusion pages to the new aspx ones, so google and such like as we don't want to lose the search engine positioning. So I intended to use URL Rewrite for this, but I cannot get it working, most of the time I just get 404s back.

Basically, my new aspx pages are all the same filename, just .cfm is replaced with .aspx, some pages can have a long querystring after them and some not.

Examples:

http://www.example.com/test.cfm needs to be remapped to http://www.example.com/test.aspx

http://www.example.com/test2.cfm?a=1&b=2&c=3 needs to be remapped to http://www.example.com/test2.aspx?a=1&b=2&c=3

The site itself has hundreds of pages and some pages have over 8 variables in the querystring, so I just wanted to try and do a straight map over in URL rewrite. I cannot do a rule per page as that will take ages!

My current attempt is:

<rule name="redirect all requests" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^(.*)$" ignoreCase="true" />
<conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll">
<add input="{URL}" pattern="^http://www.example.com/(.*).cfm(.*)$" />
</conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="http://www.example.com/{C:1}.aspx" appendQueryString="true" logRewrittenUrl="true" />
</rule>

This just does a 404 for me. Obviously the cfm pages do not exist and the aspx ones now do. I still have cold fusion installed on the server for now, and do not want to uninstall it until google has updated itself (it case of issues so I can always go back).

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

David

Answer 1

The documentation seems to cover all of this.

From the docs on HTTP Redirect:

<configuration> <system.webServer> <httpRedirect enabled="true" exactDestination="true" httpResponseStatus="Found"> <add wildcard="*.php" destination="/default.htm" /> </httpRedirect> </system.webServer> </configuration>

This led me to believe that you should be able to map URLs from one file extenstion to another.

Creating Rewrite Rules for the URL Rewrite Module

<rewrite> <rules> <rule name="Rewrite to article.aspx"> <match url="^article/([0-9]+)/([_0-9a-z-]+)" /> <action type="Rewrite" url="article.aspx?id={R:1}&amp;title={R:2}" /> </rule> </rules> </rewrite>

Try reading through these docs, you should be able to find the correct syntax that will allow you to just transfer from *.cfm to *.aspx, passing along the same query strings, or making translations as needed.

Answer 2

It's like this...

<rule name="CFM301ASP" stopProcessing="true">
    <match url="^(.*)$" />
    <conditions>
        <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" pattern="^.*\.cfm$" negate="false" ignoreCase="true" />
        <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true"/>
    </conditions>
    <action type="Redirect" url="/yourfile.aspx" appendQueryString="true" redirectType="Permanent" />
</rule>

This only works on CFMs that do not exist (isFile=false). It will 301 redirect CFMs that would cause a 404, to your ASP file, and append the URL variables.