blocking HEAD requests to my site

I am looking at my asp.net mvc site and considering blocking the HEAD verb in IIS from accessing the site.

I don't see why such requests are needed or being used at present.

Why would HEAD requests be required on a site?

Solution

The comment posted above is correct. As far as I know, HEAD request are made by the browser for checking things like...do I need to download this again, is the page still there, etc. Basically, if the browser wants to know about a page without downloading the entire page, it will issue a HEAD request. So, in short, they are not a harmful thing to be happening.

However, if you want to block these, you can do so in your web.config by using the following syntax (taken from MSDN/IIS)

<configuration>
   <system.webServer>
      <security>
         <requestFiltering>
            <verbs applyToWebDAV="false">
               <add verb="HEAD" allowed="false" />
            </verbs>
         </requestFiltering>
      </security>
   </system.webServer>
</configuration>

However, I think this is an atypical setup and you may want to test your site for performance /breaks across multiple browsers before turning this on for a production facing site.