Blog subdomain not redirecting

[MarkWill]

Over the last few weeks I have been focused on fixing high and medium priority issues, as reported by the Moz crawler, after a recent transition to WordPress. I've made great progress, getting the high priority issues down from several hundred (various reasons, but many duplicates for things like non-www and www versions) to just five last week.

And then there's this weeks report.

For reasons I can't fathom, I am suddenly getting hundreds of duplicate content pages of the form http://blog.<domain>.com</domain> (being duplicates with the http://www.<domain>.com</domain> versions). I'm really unclear on why these suddenly appeared.

I host my own WordPress site ie WordPress.org stuff. In Options / General everything refers to http://www.<domain>.com</domain> and has done for a number of weeks. I have no idea why the blog versions of the pages have suddenly appeared.

FWIW, the non-www version of my pages still redirect to the www version, as I would expect.

I'm obviously pretty concerned by this so any pointers greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Mark

[MarkWill]

So far so good - every URL I try to my site is now redirected to the www subdomain and, to date, I am unaware of any side effects. I will keep monitoring but all looks good at this point.

Thanks again to everyone who helped with this.

Mark

[Travis_Bailey]

Looks like that, or some approximation thereof has you sorted. I would just like to add that you should keep an eye on Webmaster Tools.

[AlanMosley]

Take a copy of the htaccess file, if something goes wrong, then you can always go back

[Travis_Bailey]

I'm hesitant to say; "Do X." because I'm not really sure what will happen - with the redirect plugin in the mix. I imagine a lot, if not all of the subdomain folders and pages have already been redirected via the plugin. So I imagine the path of least disaster at the moment is just redirecting the subdomain (sub.domain.com) to the main domain (www.domain.com) alone.

I could be totally wrong, but this one is weird.

Test out the rule and then push live. Here is the code to redirect just the subdomain to just the www domain:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/?$
RewriteRule .* http://www.domain.com [R=301,L]

Double check it, triple check it and then push live. Keep a very close eye on it. I really hope we don't end up with a loop.

[MarkWill]

Yep, totally agree with the thinking and prefer that approach. I researched the non-www (blank subdomain) solution a while back and the rewrite rule I used was suggested in a number of places. But your suggest seems much more robust, providing there's no gotcha (I know of none).

I implemented this and it seems to be working (after a bit of a detour because of caching :)). So, I think I am good and will monitor.

A big thanks to you and Travis. I very much appreciate the prompt responses.

Mark

[AlanMosley]

The logic I used is like this.

rather than have a rules like
If wearing jeans, you must wear the school uniform
If wearing hoodie, you must wear the school uniform
If wearing a thong, you must wear the school uniform
If naked, you must wear the school uniform

you only need one rule
If not wearing school uniform, you must wear the school uniform

[AlanMosley]

in htaccess "!" means not so try this

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

also when using regex special chars like "." should be escaped with "" see above www.domain.com

[MarkWill]

Here's the only (remotely) relevant entry I have in my .htaccess file (replacing my actual domain with <domain>):</domain>

RewriteEngine On
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^<domain>.com$
 RewriteRule (.*) http://www.<domain>.com/$1 [R=301,L]</domain></domain>

The intent of this is to redirect all URLs of the form http://<domain>.com/page</domain> to http://www.<domain>.com/page.</domain> I implemented that a while back and it seems to be working just fine.

I can't find any reference to the blog subdomain. I suspect what I need to do is implement something like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.<domain>.com$
 RewriteRule (.*) http://www.<domain>.com/$1 [R=301,L]</domain></domain>

By the way, despite appearances I am "the guy" for this site. I've completely installed/configured it from scratch so anything broken is my fault  I have the smarts to backup, test, verify, restore etc so I can make changes to .htaccess myself. I just don't have significant experience of the .htaccess file itself so just need to be cautious as I go. But it's all me

Dare I suggest that what I am trying to achieve here (redirect from the blog subdomain to the www subdomain) shouldn't be too tricky?

Thanks.

Mark

[AlanMosley]

Ok, I think I understand a bit better, you don't have a blog?
Then I would remove the dns record for blog, if you cant do that then yes you could 301 redirect

You can do this in one redirect following the logic
if not www.domain.com then redirect to www.domain.com

[MarkWill]

Thanks again, Alan.

I am thinking that what I probably need is to 301 redirect all URLs of the form http://blog.<domain>.com/page</domain> to http://www.<domain>.com/page</domain>, yes? In short I don't want to use the blog subdomain anywhere so, to avoid SEO inefficiencies, I should presumably redirect as above so that everything ends up at the www subdomain.

I think

Thanks.

Mark

[AlanMosley]

Sorry missed the bit about blog.
obviously blog.domain.com should not 301 to www
it should point to the correct site, then all reports and google will sort themselves out.

so add one more step, test that blog does in fact resolve to the correct site

[MarkWill]

Travis,

I want to be really sure I understand what you are saying so let me clarify.

I do have a blog DNS entry, referring to the server (just like I have www, to the same IP address).  In a "clean" installation, any page being requested to that server, SHOULD redirect to the www subdomain because I have www.<domain>.com</domain> specified in General \ Settings. Is that accurate so far?

However, "something" (probably in .htaccess) is kicking in that allows URLs with the blog subdomain to resolve (no redirection), regardless of what is in General \ Settings, yes?

Thanks.

Mark

[MarkWill]

Thanks Alan. I would like to verify one aspect of this.

Somehow, Moz/Google located the blog.<domain>.com pages. I honestly don't know why but I assume that if these pages have actual resolved all along, as they do now, then I could potentially have external URLs pointing to them, yes? If so, then if I just follow the suggestion you have made then won't I continue to have duplicate content issues? I fear I am missing something from your suggestion :)</domain>

PS: I just realized what you perhaps meant. I have generally seen references to "non-www" to mean URLs of the form http://<domain>.com</domain> ie. with no subdomain. But I am guessing you mean "non-www" in the broader sense - absolutely ANYTHING that doesn't have the www subdomain should redirect there. That's presumably what you had in mind, yes?

Thanks again.

Mark

[Travis_Bailey]

This particular situation won't sort itself out. There's a sub involved and I suspect it's a rewrite rule that shouldn't be there. The developer appears to be somewhat sophisticated as they're using X-FRAME-OPTIONS in a way that doesn't allow iFrames to work outside of the domain.

So who knows what goodies await in .htaccess.

[AlanMosley]

Test that non-www 301's to www
Make sure that all your internal links point to www, you don't want links that you control going thought a redirect.

If those 2 are ok, then forget the report it will sort itself out over time.

[Travis_Bailey]

Okay, here's what I got:

The plugin supposedly operates independently of .htaccess. So taking that at face value, I don't think you're going to get what you need out of the plugin.

I would imagine the .htaccess file is much the same as it was when the site launched, or when it was last modified by the developer. So that file is likely going to need editing to achieve what you need. However, that file isn't something you just want to play with in a live environment.

And it's not something anyone in their right mind would blindly say; "Yeah just copy and paste this rule!"

I would talk to Dale and see if he has a block of free time coming up.

[MarkWill]

We are using the Redirection plugin.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

However, everything I have entered is at the page level (redirect page1 to page2). I don't know if the Redirection plugin even supports subdomain redirection. I am checking that now (a quick scan of the support page for that plugin finds every question related to subdomains unanswered :)).

It seems the working assumption is that nothing changed and that Moz/Google just found this for the first time, which I hadn't considered.

Thanks.

Mark

[LesleyPaone]

You are going to have to add a manual rewrite rule to the htaccess, preferably at the top. This might help, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1321123/redirect-from-subdomain-to-domain-htaccess  But like Travis said, be careful, make a back up, because you can break your site doing this.

[Travis_Bailey]

You mentioned in the above thread that you're using a redirection plugin. What is it's name? Beyond that Yoast and All in One both allow you to edit htaccess entries. (I despise that feature, btw.)

[MarkWill]

Thank you Travis. I have never actually edited the .htaccess file directly (not even 100% sure where it is :)) but I guess what you suggest could be put there through other means (plugins, etc).

Just to make sure I understand, though, what I actually want is a 301 redirect for all pages under the blog subdomain to the www domain. I'm not overly familiar with the .htaccess syntax for redirects (but can research) - but if you happen to have the syntax for that I'd be appreciative

Thanks again.

Mark

[MarkWill]

Thank you Leslie. Yes, I can browse to the blog... pages and they remain that way in the browsers URL field. So, the thinking is that this has been around all along and Moz/Google just found it? Interesting.

So, any idea on how I would fix this? I do use the Redirection plugin (and have been entering quite a few redirects recently) but as far as I can tell that plugin allows me to redirect between pages, rather than redirect subdomains i.e. I can redirect http://www.<domain>.com/page1</domain> to http://www.<domain>.com/page2</domain> but not www -> something else.

Thank you again, Leslie.

[Travis_Bailey]

I'm going to guess that you have something that looks like this in your .htaccess file:
RewriteRule ^blog/$ http://blog.website.com [L,NC,R=301]

WARNING

You can knock your site down with the slightest syntax error when you mess with the htaccess file. Proceed with caution.

---

Read this first.

Let us know what you find.

[LesleyPaone]

Can you access the pages at blog.yoursite.com? Do they show up in the browser? It could be an issue that has always been there that Google just found.

[MarkWill]

I should add that I do have a DNS record for the blog subdomain. However, that has been in place all along, including the last few weeks where these duplicate content errors didn't exist. Given the settings in Settings \ General I would expect these to be redirected to http://www.<domain>.com</domain>, which seems to be what was happening up until this weeks report.