Are you planning on migrating from another eCommerce (or non eCommerce) platform to AspDotNetStorefront?  If the answer to this question is yes, then you need to consider your current site page structure and how the migration is going to affect your search engine result pages (SERPS) within Google/MSN/Yahoo/(insert search engine here).

There are a few ways to handle 301 Redirects within AspDotNetStorefront, none of which are out of the box answers (except when version 9 is released – more on that later).

Method 1 – eCommerceCartMods.com 301 Redirect Add-On

The guys at ecommercecartmods.com have a number of great add on modules for AspDotNetStorefront, one of which handles 301 Redirects nicely.  It allows you to configure a set of key-value pairs of Old Url – New Url data.  Let’s talk about what we like and don’t like about this mod:

Our Likes

- No limit to the number of pages you can configure.
- Nice user interface for administering the redirects.
- Works with more than just .aspx pages (i.e. – php, jsp, html etc…)

Dislikes

The support for more advanced url schemas isn’t really great, so if you are coming off of another cart platform that didn’t have addresses in the root of the site then you may experience problems (we have).

The user interface, while good, sits in the root of your site and is protected by your level of access.  Still, we’d like to see an admin interface that sat within the /admin/ folder and navigation system of AspDotNetStorefronts back end.

Method 2 – IIS 7 Redirects Configuration

As some of you may know, IIS7 has the ability to handle redirects directly within the IIS 7 Management Console.  There are tons of articles on the web explaining how to do this, so I’ll just kindly link to one with nice pictures and walk thrus on how to accomplish them.

Method 3 – Demac Media AspDotNetStorefront 301 Redirect Solution

As you can imagine, we deal with the issue of 301 Redirects quite often (hence this blog post).  We’ve developed a set of tools and processes to not just give you a nice interface for adding URLs one by one, but for doing bulk inserting, updating and matching based on your current sites Google Sitemap.  It’s not just about using the sitemap and pre-populating the OLD URLs, but rather it is an exercise in knowing how your old platform created those URLs and how we can match those old URLs up to how AspDotNetStorefront generates URLs.  Sounds a little complicated, but it really isn’t once you’ve done it a few dozen times.

Method 4 – AspDotNetStorefront Version 9 (coming soon!)

In the next full release of AspDotNetStorefront they are implementing full control over the URL structure of your site.  This should take care of a large number of 301 Redirect issues when migrating platforms.  Now you’ll be able to keep your current URL structure from your old site and implement it on AspDotNetStorefront. 

That about sums up 301 Redirects and AspDotNetStorefront.  Hope it helps!