Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
We have set up 301 redirects for pages from an old domain, but they aren't working and we are having duplicate content problems - Can you help?
-
We have several old domains. One is http://www.ccisound.com - Our "real" site is http://www.ccisolutions.com The 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain works. However, the 301-redirects for interior pages, like:
http://www.ccisolund.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators do not work. This URL should redirect to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators but as you can see it does not.
Our IT director supplied me with this code from the HT Access file in hopes that someone can help point us in the right direction and suggest how we might fix the problem:
RewriteCond%{HTTP_HOST} ccisound.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule^(.*)$ http://www.ccisolutions.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Any ideas on why the 301 redirect isn't happening? Thanks all!
-
Yes, That is the best thing you can do. Because seems there have some other issues in configs. And we can not see from here about your all the configs. Anyway the codes we have given you will successfully work once you solve your other problems.
Best Regards
Prasad
-
Thanks Prasad for all your help. And thank you to Ersin also. We have solved the problem. Apparently, our URL re-write at the TomCat level was taking precedence over the .htaccess file. Once our IT director added the appropriate redirect for these domain pages into the URL re-write file, the problem was fixed and those pages now render with a 301-redirect to the correct page one the correct domain. I have encouraged him to write a blog post about this and put it here because there was very little documentation online about TomCat redirects tasking precedence over an .htaccess file.
-
Thanks Prasad,
We tried your suggestion because there was a lot of stuff [1220 lines of code] in our .htaccess file. We stripped everything out except your code, and still had the same problem. Our IT director is wondering if perhaps there is a conflict between the .htaccess file that operates at the Apache level and the URL rewirte file which operates at the TomCat level. He is wondering, does one of them take precedence over the other? In other words, could our URL re-write file be causing the redirects in the .htaccess file to not work properly?
I am thinking maybe we need to hire someone to look at the code in both files in order to figure out where and why we are having a conflict?
Dana
-
Hi,
I think you are doing so many mistakes. First take out all the other codes from your .htaccess file. Then copy only one code from me or from Ersin. While you have some other codes related to this domains redirection there may have conflicts. And your current code work for your root domains mean your .htaccess redirection is working. The problem is you have not used it correctly.
-
Thanks to both Ersin and Prasad. I appreciate your efforts to help very much. My IT director tried both versions of code without success. Here is exactly what he wrote:
" I tried the suggestions without success. I even moved the ccisound
redirects to the top of the file thinking that some other redirect was grabbing
it first, But no go, same results. Top level redirected, lower level not."Any suggestions as to why neither code succeeded at creating a "catch all." ?
-
cprasad's and my purpose are same, so our responses will work. But just some diffrences;
"<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">" line checks wheter Apache's rewrite module is activated or not. If it is then it runs the code after that. The second one is that my rewritecond lines are less than cprasad's, but they all same conditions.By the way, i have just tested it before I wrote it.</ifmodule>
Just do it..
-
Hi,
Do not worry about the differences about the code provided by me and by Ersin. Both are same in functioning. He have just added module activation tags in to the code. So you may use any code which you prefer and works for you.
And the answer for your question about the code you were using, it may not be initiate a wildcard redirection.
Are there more codes inside the .htaccess?
If you can post the exact code without hyper-linking any url then I can tell you the exact reason why your code does not do the job.
Prasad
-
Thanks Ersin,
Can you explain how your coding suggestion is different from Prasad's? I am not a coder so am just wondering if there's a different methodology behind the two suggestions?
-
Yes, a catch-all makes sense to me. what is the difference between your code suggestion and the one just below posted by Ersin A. ? Also, just for our own understanding, can you explain why the code we were using wasn't accomplishing what we wanted? (I just want to be able to explain it to our Web team). Thanks!
-
Hi,
The supplied url for interior page of old domain which you have mentioned not redirecting seems not correct. Because you have linked that text with the new domain. Anyway I have understand your problem. Your problem is
is redirecting to
but
http://www.ccisound.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators
is not redirecting to
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators
If I have understood correctly, the solution for your problem is, Do a wildcard 301 redirection. It will redirects all the inner pages to the new domain's inner pages. But all the inner pages in new site, must have the same paths as the old site. Hope you understand what I mean.
Anyway when look in to the example urls you have provided it seems both sites have the same content. So there is nothing to worry about. Seems you have just changed domain name.
So anyway use the following code in your .htaccess file inside your root folder
RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^ccisound.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.ccisound.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http://www.ccisolutions.com/$1" [R=301,L]First and second line do not write again if those already written inside your .htaccess file.
the above code will initiate a wildcard 301 redirection and will solve your problem. Hope you can improve the code for all the other domains you have. Otherwise post here. I will do it for you.
Regards
Prasad
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Delete old blog posts after 301 redirects to new pages?
Hi Moz Community, I've recently created several new pages on my site using much of the same copy from blog posts on the same topics (we did this for design flexibility and a few other reasons). The blogs and pages aren't exactly identical, as the new pages have much more content, but I don't think there's a point to having both and I don't want to have duplicate content, so we've used 301 redirects from the old blog posts to the new pages of the same topic. My question is: can I go ahead and delete the old blog posts? (Or would there be any reasons I shouldn't delete them?) I'm guessing with the 301 redirects, all will be well in the world and I can just delete the old posts, but I wanted to triple check to make sure. Thanks so much for your feedback, I really appreciate it!
Technical SEO | | TaraLP1 -
How to deal with duplicated content on product pages?
Hi, I have a webshop with products with different sizes and colours. For each item I have a different URL, with almost the same content (title tag, product descriptions, etc). In order to prevent duplicated content I'am wondering what is the best way to solve this problem, keeping in mind: -Impossible to create one page/URL for each product with filters on colour and size -Impossible to rewrite the product descriptions in order to be unique I'm considering the option to canonicolize the rest of de colours/size variations, but the disadvantage is that in case the product is not in stock it disappears from the website. Looking forward to your opinions and solutions. Jeroen
Technical SEO | | Digital-DMG0 -
Localized domains and duplicate content
Hey guys, In my company we are launching a new website and there's an issue it's been bothering me for a while. I'm sure you guys can help me out. I already have a website, let's say ABC.com I'm preparing a localized version of that website for the uk so we'll launch ABC.co.uk Basically the websites are going to be exactly the same with the difference of the homepage. They have a slightly different proposition. Using GeoIP I will redirect the UK traffic to ABC.co.uk and the rest of the traffic will still visit .com website. May google penalize this? The site itself it will be almost the same but the homepage. This may count as duplicate content even if I'm geo-targeting different regions so they will never overlap. Thanks in advance for you advice
Technical SEO | | fabrizzio0 -
Error: Missing Meta Description Tag on pages I can't find in order to correct
This seems silly, but I have errors on blog URLs in our WordPress site that I don't know how to access because they are not in our Dashboard. We are using All in One SEO. The errors are for blog archive dates, authors and just simply 'blog'. Here are samples: http://www.fateyes.com/2012/10/
Technical SEO | | gfiedel
http://www.fateyes.com/author/gina-fiedel/
http://www.fateyes.com/blog/ Does anyone know how to input descriptions for pages like these?
Thanks!!0 -
404 error - but I can't find any broken links on the referrer pages
Hi, My crawl has diagnosed a client's site with eight 404 errors. In my CSV download of the crawl, I have checked the source code of the 'referrer' pages, but can't find where the link to the 404 error page is. Could there be another reason for getting 404 errors? Thanks for your help. Katharine.
Technical SEO | | PooleyK0 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains
Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:" for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions. When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP. This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain. We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w. This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index. However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again. If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain. When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain. So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301. But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains. Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing? These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse. All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing. Could this be the issue? None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain. Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.
Technical SEO | | sboelter0 -
Does 'framing' a website create duplicate content?
Something I have not come across before, but hope others here are able offer advice based on experience: A client has independently created a series of mini-sites, aimed at targeting specific locations. The tactic has worked very well and they have achieved a large amount of well targeted traffic as a result. Each mini-site is different but then in the nav, if you want to view prices or go to the booking page, that then links to what at first appears to be their main site. However, you then notice that the URL is actually situated on the mini-site. What they have done is 'framed' the main site so that it appears exactly the same even when navigating through this exact replica site. Checking the code, there is almost nothing there - in fact there is actually no content at all. Below the head, there is a piece of code: <frameset rows="*" framespacing=0 frameborder=0> <frame src="[http://www.example.com](view-source:http://www.yellowskips.com/)" frameborder=0 marginwidth=0 marginheight=0> <noframes>Your browser does not support frames. Click [here](http://www.example.com) to view.noframes> frameset> Given that main site content does not appear to show in the source code, do we have an issue with duplicate content? This issue is that these 'referrals' are showing in Analytics, despite the fact that the code does not appear in the source, which is slightly confusing for me. They have done this without consultation and I'm very concerned that this could potentially be creating duplicate content of their ENTIRE main site on dozens of mini-sites. I should also add that there are no links to the mini-sites from the main site, so if you guys advise that this is creating duplicate content, I would not be worried about creating a link-wheel if I advise them to link directly to the main site rather than the framed pages. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | RiceMedia0