I recently moved the DevMavens.com site from one server to another and needed to ensure that the www.devmavens.com domain correctly redirected to simply devmavens.com. This is important for SEO reasons (you don’t want multiple domains to refer to the same content) and it’s generally better to use the shorter URL (www is so 20th century) rather than wasting 4 characters for zero gain.

My friend and IIS guru Scott Forsyth pointed me to his blog post on how to set up IIS URL Rewriting. To get started, you simply install IIS Rewrite from this link using the super awesome Web Platform Installer. You should get something like this when you’re done with the install:

If you already have IIS Manager open, you may need to close it and re-open it before you see the URL Rewrite module. Once you do, you should see it listed for any given Site under the IIS section:

Double click on the URL Rewrite icon, and then choose the Add Rule(s) action. You can simply create a blank rule, and name it “Redirect from www to domain.com.” Essentially we’re following the instructions from Scott Forsyth’s post, but in reverse since he’s showing how to add 4 useless characters to the URL and I’m interested in removing them.

After adding the name, we’ll set the Match Url section’s Using dropdown to Wildcards and specify a pattern of simply * to match anything.

In the Conditions section we need to add a new condition with an Input of {HTTP_HOST} such that it should match the pattern www.devmavens.com (replace this with your domain).

Ignore the Server Variables section.

Set the action to Redirect and the Redirect URL to http://devmavens.com/{R:0} (replace with your domain). The {R:0} will be replaced with whatever the user had entered. So if they were going to http://www.devmavens.com/default.aspx they’ll now be going to http://devmavens.com/default.aspx.

The complete Inbound Rule should look like this:

That’s it! Test it out and make sure you haven’t accidentally used my exact URLs and started sending all of your users to devmavens.com! Be sure to readScott’s postfor more information on how to useregular expressionsfor your rules, and how to set them up via web.config rather than IIS manager.