Htaccess Question - Is this the way to go to consolidate?
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Hi all,
My site seems to have www.xyz.com, http://www.xyz.com, http://xyz.com and other variations! From an old agency doing this. All showing differing backlinks etc. SO I want to merge them so I can just look at one analytics account - with everything combined.
I want it just to consolidate all to https:///www.xym.com as the client wants - how do I do this? Does it take long to take effect??
Also I presume in webmaster I'll have to set up the preferred extension?
Thanks very much for any advice
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We can help you get all those urls to point to the https on the server. But what reports are you referring to?
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It's actually just by looking at link reports to the variations that I can see they fluctuate with differing versions. So I'm looking for a simple way to make sure all the prefixes redirect to https://. Thanks for the comments so far.
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Excellent addition. Probably a combination of both since he states that the client wants to migrate to HTTPS. We'll have to get clarification from Giles.
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Ryan,
I was going to mention this but after I re-read it. It seems he is dealing with an issue inside Google Webmaster Central that shows reports for more then one domain. I have seen this before where they list domains likehttp://www.site.com
http://www.site.com/shop
http://www.site.com/Each showing different metrics.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
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Hi Giles. You'll end up with something similar to this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L]RewriteRule ^page1(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/page1$1 [R,L]
The first being an example of redirecting an entire domain to HTTPS and the second, a specific page.
The effects of the redirection are immediate in the sense that once the .htaccess file is changed the redirection will be in place. What takes a longer amount of time is for the change to carry over in Google's ranking and throughout the web. Using the tools in GWT and Bing can help.
Here are a couple of guides that you might find useful: http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos and http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection.
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