Removing the X-Powered-By Header

Open up IIS Manager, choose your site and go to HTTP Response Headers. Here you’ll see X-Powered-By being inherited. You can either remove it only for this site or for all sites on this server (select the server name in IIS Manager and HTTP Response Headers).

You can also do this in your sites web.config.

<system.webServer>
...
<httpProtocol>
    <customHeaders>
        <remove name="X-Powered-By" />
    </customHeaders>
</httpProtocol>
...
</system.webServer>

Removing the Server Header

To remove this HTTP Header we need to create a custom HTTP Module.

using System;
using System.Web;
 
namespace MyNamespace
{
    public class HttpHeadersCleanup : IHttpModule
    {
        public void Init(HttpApplication context)
        {
            context.PreSendRequestHeaders += PreSendRequestHeaders;
        }
 
        private static void PreSendRequestHeaders(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            HttpContext.Current.Response.Headers.Remove("Server");
        }
 
        public void Dispose()
        {
        }
    }
}

You also need to register the HTTP Module in your sites web.config.

<system.webServer>
...
    <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true">
        <add name="HttpHeadersCleanup " type="MyNamespace.HttpHeadersCleanup, MyAssembly"/>
    </modules>
...
</system.webServer>

Removing the ETag Header

For more information on ETag see: HTTP ETag.

To remove ETag you need to add the code below to the HTTP Module described previously.

HttpContext.Current.Response.Headers.Remove("ETag");

Removing the X-Aspnet-Version Header

To remove this HTTP Header you simply set enableVersionHeader to false in your sites web.config.

<system.web>
...
    <httpRuntime enableVersionHeader="false" />
...
</system.web>

Or by removing it in the HTTP Module:

HttpContext.Current.Response.Headers.Remove("X-AspNet-Version");

Here’s how the HTTP Headers look now:

Related Posts:

• Detecting Ajax requests on the server
• Part 8: Preparing for launch – Create an EPiServer site from scratch
• Faster EPiServer sites – client side performance
• Part 1: Setting up the development environment – Create an EPiServer site from scratch
• Getting the Page and EPiServer CurrentPage object from HttpContext

Let’s start by downloading and installing the URL Rewrite extension. The official IIS site has a download section with some very cool extension that I recommend you check out when you have the time. For now we only need the URL Rewrite extension. This will launch the Web Platform Installer, click Install and Accept. You should now see a new module in IIS.

To setup the rule we need for our canonical domain, just click the Add Rule(s) link and and under Search Engine Optimization (SEO) section choose Canonical domain name. Select a primary host name and you’re done!

What this does is redirect all traffic going to www.frederikvig.com to frederikvig.com, www.frederikvig.com/news to frederikvig.com/news etc, with a 301 (permanent redirect).

The reason this is important for SEO purposes is that search engines treat all URLs differently, so when you have two or more URLs all pointing to the same content your search ranking will suffer. Fortunately we have fixed this now with this rule, next time Google or some other search engine visits your site it will update it’s indexes, making all links point to the same domain name.

There are a lot of other great enhancements (Enforce lowercase URLs, User Friendly URLs etc) that I recommend checking out. Here are a few articles to get you started.Related Posts:

• Specify your preferred external URL in EPiServer
• Links for EPiServer Developers – #2
• Part 7: Creating the Sitemap page – Create an EPiServer site from scratch
• Using multiple forms on an ASP.NET web forms page
• Part 8: Preparing for launch – Create an EPiServer site from scratch