Few months ago, I ran into a seemingly devastating problem. I had initially started my official online presence 
with the domain codeofdefiance.com. At that time the name meant something that kind of died off after a certain project was completed. So, I thought of moving on to this new domain (Codoxide.com). I purchased it and asked my service provider (PlanetSMB.com) to use it with my existing package. They of course, did exactly what I asked them to and planted Codoxide.com as my primary domain and CodeofDefiance.com as an alias to the same.
As any self-respecting web master would do, I continued to monitor my new domain using Google Analytics and Web Master Tools, and of course the search. After a while, it became obvious that my new domain was not going to get indexed. If I ran a search for very specific keywords that had a high likelihood of hitting, say, www.codoxide.com/posts/pageA.aspx, Google would always show www.codeofdefiance.com/posts/pageA.aspx but not the former. For any experienced web master, problem here would have been obvious. Google had already developed it's relationship with my old domain. For all it knew, Codoxide was some obscure web site mirroring the content of an established site. And I hear, that's a pretty deadly sin in Google's eyes. Such a rookie mistake...
Well, a quick fix for this would have been to take down the old domain name and wait for search engines to pick up the new site. But then, I'd be starting back at zero, if I was to do that. The only good solution was to get search engines to understand that CodeOfDefiance will from then on be Codoxide!
301 To the Rescue
What I needed was to respond to each request for CodeOfDefiance with a "301 Permanent Redirect" response. I asked PlanetSMB whether they could do it. It turned out that they couldn't, which lead me to this workaround. For anybody that might find himself in this situation, here are the steps to follow (I did all this from my site's web admin panel PLESK):
1. Setup a new web application under your site. Let's say the virtual directory you picked was "/redirect"
2. Add a Default.aspx page to site and the following code to it:
[code:c#]
<%@ Page Language="C#" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-
//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<script runat="server">
protected void Page_Load(
object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanantly";
Response.Location = "http:
//www.codoxide.com/Default.aspx";
}
</script>
<html xmlns="http:
//www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
<title>Untitled Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div>
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>
[/code]
3. Add an error.aspx page with the following code;
[code:c#]
try
{
string requestedPath = Request.QueryString["aspxerrorpath"];
Response.RedirectLocation = string.Format("http://www.codoxide.com{0}{1}",
requestedPath.StartsWith("/") ? "" : "/",
requestedPath);
}
catch (Exception)
{
Response.RedirectLocation = "http://www.codoxide.com/";
}
[/code]
This will ensure that all previous bookmarks, links will point correctly to the new location.
4. And finally, the web.config file:
[code:xml]
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
<system.web>
<customErrors mode="On" defaultRedirect="~/error.aspx" >
<error statusCode="404" redirect="~/error.aspx" />
</customErrors>
<compilation debug="true"/></system.web>
</configuration>
[/code]
5. Go to your DNS server settings and configure it as follows:
And, that's it. Next time crawlers try to index your old domain they will be politely asked to look at the new site instead.
UPDATE: While it's not visible in the image above, the Address field in the Advanced DNS Settings point to http://<new domain>/<redirect folder>/Default.aspx.
