ASP.NET urlMappings

urlMappings redirect URLs to new locations. This element is part of an ASP.NET config file. It quickly redirects Googlebot and users alike to the new locations. It is easily added to Web.config to perform this complex task.

This ASP.NET article shows how to use the urlMappings element in Web.config.

Example urlMappings

We can use urlMappings, a special tag you can put in your Web.sitemap. Here is a table of some "old style" URLs that I want to map to new URLs. You can see the new URLs had SEO improvements with more keywords.

Examples for: url

~/Content/Page10.aspx
~/Content/Page13.aspx
~/Content/Page25.aspx

Examples for: mappedUrl

~/Content/Int-Parse-Conversion.aspx
~/Content/Post-Pre-Build-Macros.aspx
~/Content/Programming-Blogs.aspx

Add urlMappings

You can add urlMappings by adding markup to your Web.config file. Remember, the ~ symbol, called a tilde, is a reference to the root of the virtual application directory. That's the root directory of your website. The following code example shows the urlMappings tag.

Web.config examples [XML]

<urlMappings enabled="true">
    <add url="~/Content/Page22.aspx"
	mappedUrl="~/Content/ASP-TreeView-Recursion.aspx"/>
    <add url="~/Content/Page9.aspx"
	mappedUrl="~/Content/Directed-Acyclic-Word-Graph.aspx"/>
</urlMappings>

Open Web.config. Web.config is part of your website project in the Solution Explorer. You will need to double-click on it. Next, find the system.web element. Locate the <system.web> element and its closing tag. Put your <urlMappings> block into a section in the middle of that section.

Summary

Here we saw how you can use urlMappings as a quick fix for redirecting requests on your ASP.NET server. There are other methods that may be more powerful. Use the RewritePath method in ASP.NET and Global.asax for a more flexible approach.