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Linking Test
Configuring the Web Server
The Internet Information Services (IIS) is Microsoft's Web Server software and can be configured using the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). This however does require either direct access to the server or remote access using Terminal Services or a third party remote interface. There is also a HTTP (Web) interface that allows access and configuration using a browser. This is reasonably secure as it needs authentication, and the IPs that are allowed access can be limited. A further level of protection is in the port number that the Administration site will respond to. This is assigned at random when IIS is installed and can be changed to suit the server manager.
Application Mappings
Often for an existing website with many pages that are indexed a need arises for scripting or server side includes (SSI) to be used on these pages. As standard, to use ASP scripting the page extension must be .asp and to use SSI the page extension must be .shtm, .shtml or .asp. However if the site was developed in purely HTML and the filename extensions are .htm and .html and it would be an arduous and time consuming task to enable redirection for every page. This is where a feature of IIS can be used. The application mappings are the way that the server "knows" how to handle different page extensions and can be used to change the way that other file extensions are handled.
Redirecting a Site or Pages
Redirection of a site or pages within a site is something that needs to been done correctly if the site is indexed by the search engines and requires to stay there. There can also be a need for redirecting where the site has several aliased hostnames.
If all the hostnames return a 200 (Ok) response the search engines will see the sites as duplicates of each other, while this is not a major problem and eventually one hostname will be "chosen" as the only one to be shown in the results. However this may not be the one you would choose and each major engine may pick a different one, depending on what their "importance" criteria is.
To avoid this happening a permanent redirect (301 response) needs to be applied to all hostnames apart from the main one.
