320 replies to this topic

[chrishirst]

you are looking at DNS. 301 are set on the server not DNS. but the DNS sounds correct.
The exact how depends on your server technology

[sweepthelegnate]

sorry, guess my skull is just thicker than most. I think I got it working now...


nathan

[Randy]

Yep, you're doing more of an alias when working with the DNS Nathan. It'll get people to the right content, but it won't change the url in their browser address bar. To the viewer it'll look like they're still on the non-preferred domain.

If it's the site in your profile, or another site on the same server, it looks like you're running on a *nix server. If that's the case, the following should do it as long as your host allows you to use .htaccess files:

• Change the DNS back to the way it was before.
• In any simple text editor (Notepad, etc ... not Word) open a new file and put the following line in it
  
  CODE
  Redirect 301 / http://www.preferreddomain.com/
• Save that as a file named .htaccess
• Upload it to the root level of your non-preferred domain.

Now when you call up any page from your non-preferred domain you should be automatically forwarded to the same page on your preferred domain.

[sweepthelegnate]

thanks randy...

I did it like this because for some reason the regular redirects were giving me a limit exceeded message.

CODE

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domainone\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domaintwo.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domainone\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domaintwo.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domaintwo\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domaintwo.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

don't know if this is the best way.

but it seems to be working.

nathan

[qwerty]

While we're on the subject of 301s, what's the best way to redirect domain.com/dir/index.htm to domain.com/dir/ ? I thought I had it figured out a few months ago, but when I tried it, the site wouldn't even load.

[Randy]

hmm... That's a tricky on Bob. Because whether someone typed in just the /dir/ or /dir/index.htm the redirect is going to fire off. Effectively creating an endless loop. Even a standard RedirectMatch would freak out over that one, unless you changed the default file name for that one directory.

Lemme think on it for a moment to see if I get any inspiration.

[Randy]

Well Bob, I still don't have any inspiration.

Everything I've thought of using .htaccess is going to cause a loop of one sort or another since /dir/ and /dir/index.htm is actually loading the same page.

I can tell you how to do it in PHP by detecting the $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] variable and then doing a header redirect if index.php appears in the url address. But having Apache do the redirect is considerably trickier.

Anybody else have any thoughts? I feel like I'm missing something.

[qwerty]

Don't hurt your head over this It's a pretty minor problem. A few sites link to this one with domain.com/index.htm, and one of those just happens to send us more traffic than any other source, including search engines, so I thought it might give us a little boost if I could redirect it. And yes, I've tried contacting them to ask them to change it.

Ah well...

[Jeff]

Hi,

Are .htaccess and PHP 301 redirects treated the same by search engines?

Thanks.

[Jill]

As long as the page serves up a 301 response, then it doesn't matter how they achieve it.

[magicboxgifts]

Hi guys

have got access to the .htaccess file with my host but just wondering do I need to add anything

We have changed all our pages to .php from .html to utilise our database info etc.

The main links showing are all to our index page without any suffix (ie www.mydomain.com) so no problem there but I was wondering do i need to ad the 301 to the rest of the pages that have been indexed or should I wait for the purge?

We are on apache servers uploading in ASCII

Thanks guys and keep up the great work.

Edited by magicboxgifts, 08 February 2005 - 06:46 AM.

[Randy]

I would recommend it for two reasons. Partly in case people have an interior page bookmarked or someone is linking to an interior page; and partly to help the search engines get everything switched over quicker.

If your file names remained constant except for the extension change, the easiest way to do that is:

CODE

RedirectMatch 301 (.*)\.html$ http://www.yourdomain.com$1.php

What that does is take any request for <anyfilename>.html and automatically redirects to <anyfilename>.php

[BobetteKyle]

Would the same thing work for .shtml also (replacing "php" with "shtml" in Randy's code)? I'm thinking about switching away from Frontpage page includes to all server side includes.

[qwerty]

You could add this to your .htaccess

CODE

AddHandler server-parsed .shtml .htm

[Randy]

Yes it would work Bobette.

As would Qwerty's solution, if your host allows that type of manipulation.