Invalid URLthat is perfectly valid

[Web-Incite]

Hi, I'm trying to add http://www.isotopx.com/ as a campaign in my Moz account but I keep being told the URL is invalid. The site is active on the Internet and I have Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics access so I'm confused why Moz is struggling to connect.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

[DavidLee]

Hey Colin

Have you checked with the domain registrar enom.com to see if the re-direct might be on their side?

[Web-Incite]

Hi guys,

I'm still struggling with this problem. I've tried Moz help and they suggested I try back here again. Basically there is a 302 somewhere in the system that's stopping me from adding www.Isotopx.com as a campaign in Moz. I've removed the htaccess file (although it didn't actually contain a 302) and waited three days in case the DNS needed to update but the 302 remains.

The most recent reply I received from Moz help included this information…

'The weird thing is that I tried some header checkers and hit the site as googlebot and bingbot. Googlebot gave a 200 but bingbot didn't so this 302 seems a bit selective. There may be something on the server level doing this.'

I've spoken to the hosting company and they assure me that there are no redirects on the server. Can anyone think of where this 302 might be hiding?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Colin

[DavidLee]

Hi Colin

If the 302 has been removed it may take up to 48 hours for DNS to propagate as it still shows the re-direct

curl -I isotopx.com

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily

Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2014 15:04:08 GMT

Server: Apache/2.4.6 (Unix)

X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.17

Set-Cookie: sukaadmin=eblan; expires=Sat, 01-Jan-2022 00:00:00 GMT; path=/; domain=.isotopx.com

Location: http://isotopx.com/

Content-Type: text/html

[Web-Incite]

Hi all,

All diverts have been removed but I'm still unable to add Isotopx.com. Does anyone else have any suggestions?

Colin Fenwick

[Web-Incite]

Hi Onlinq,

The canonical instruction is to stop duplicate home pages being indexed i.e. /index and /index.html.

I think that David has homed in on the problem, I just now need to find out where that 302 is hiding!

Thanks,

Colin

[Web-Incite]

Hi David,

Thanks for your help here. The 301 is obviously to get rid of the non-www form but there is nothing in the .htaccess file for that 302. The hosts changed the server IP address a little while back and I'm currently checking with them whether the 302 is sitting on the server for some reason.

Hopefully I'll be able to get to the bottom of it.

Thanks again,

Colin

[Onlinq]

In addition to that I also noticed the main page seems to indicate itself as being canonical. I can imagine that this also interferes with any search engines or Moz indexing the website.

[DavidLee]

Hey there!

It appears your site has a 302 re-direct loop that might cause our tool to invalidate. Spidertest.com is also not able to validate the domain.

curl -I isotopx.com
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2014 15:40:06 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.6 (Unix)
Location: http://www.isotopx.com/                 <--- re-directs to the www version
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

curl -I www.isotopx.com
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily       <--- ignored by crawlers
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2014 15:40:13 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.6 (Unix)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.17
Set-Cookie: sukaadmin=eblan; expires=Sat, 01-Jan-2022 00:00:00 GMT; path=/; domain=.isotopx.com
Location: http://www.isotopx.com/      <---- re-directs to itself which repeats the re-direct
Content-Type: text/html

You will want to just have the re-direct of rootdomain with the 301 to the www subdomain and removing the 302 re-direct to itself should do the trick.

Hope this helps!

[Onlinq]

Have you tried adding a different website as a campaign to check if that works?

If you can't add any websites as campaigns at all you should make sure you have the required capacity to add another campaign (since each account has a limit on how many campaigns it can track).

If all of that checks out but you still can't do anything, I'd recommend sending a detailed explanation of the problem to help@moz.com. The support is usually excellent and fast.

Hope this helps.

[Web-Incite]

Hi, I've tried every combination including with and without the HTTP://, with and without www, down to simply Isotopx.com but I get the same response every time.

Sorry, I don't know what else to add!

[Onlinq]

Hello,

Are you trying to add the url including the "http://"?
Moz does that for you, so you should add it as "www.isotopx.com" or "isotopx.com" depending on if you want to get statistics for the "www" subdomain.

If this doesn't help, post exactly what you are trying and copy/paste the exact values you are using so I or the community can see exactly what you're doing

Cheers,
Karst
Onlinq