Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our
site. Try the following two URLs on my site:
http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx
http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx
Notice that the first URL (which has a capital “A”)
automatically does a redirect to a lower-case version of the URL.
Scenario 3: Trailing Slashes
Another common SEO problem I discussed earlier in this post
is the scenario of trailing slashes within URLs. The trailing slash
creates yet another situation that causes search engines to treat the URLs as
different and so split search rankings:
http://scottgu.com
http://scottgu.com/
We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that
automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL (that does not
have a trailing slash) to instead go to the second one that does. Like
before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which
will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use
the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they
retrieve.
To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the
URL Rewrite admin tool again. This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to
appear again:
The URL Rewrite admin tool has a built-in
“Append or remove the trailing slash symbol” rule template.
When we select it and click the “ok” button
we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a rule that
automatically redirects users to a URL with a trailing slash if one isn’t
present:
When we click the “OK” button we’ll get a
pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if the URL
doesn’t have a trailing slash – and if the URL is not processed by either a
directory or a file.
Like within our previous lower-casing rewrite
rule we’ll add one additional condition clause that will exclude
WebResource.axd URLs from being processed by this rule. This will avoid
an unnecessary redirect for happening for those URLs.
This will save the following additional rule
to our web.config file:
<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" />
<action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />
</rule>
<rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" />
<conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll"
trackAllCaptures="false">
<add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />
</conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" />
</rule>
<rule name="Trailing Slash" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="(.*[^/])$" />
<conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll"
trackAllCaptures="false">
<add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory"
negate="true" />
<add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile"
negate="true" />
<add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />
</conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />
</rule>
</rules>
</rewrite>
</system.webServer>
</configuration> 
