Redirect chains from switch to HTTPS
-
Hi,
We have a client who recently switched their site to https://
The rule to force redirect non-secure URLs to https is in their .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
if non-SSL and one of these, redirect to SSL
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.clientdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]However, they also have simple redirects below this rule that redirect one page to another, such as:
Redirect 301 /old.php https://www.clientdomain.com/new.php
This is causing redirect chains like this:
(A) http://www.clientdomain.com/old.php > (B) https://www.clientdomain.com/old.php > (C) https://www.clientdomain.com/new.php
Is there any way to rewrite the rules in .htaccess to get rid of these redirect chains? So that URL A goes directly to URL C?
Thank you!
-
Hi,
We are still waiting for the developer to make the change. I will certainly post the answer when we know for sure!
Thanks
-
Hi was this ever resolved as this would help many people?
-
Thank you!! Just sent it
-
Yes - of course. Happy to take a look.
-
Hi Will,
That is correct - the developer told me that's exactly what he did. Could I send you a screenshot of the actual .htaccess file in a private message?
Thank you!
-
Hi Lori,
On closer inspection, I think that only the rewriterule should have the [L] flag and that placing the specific Redirect at the top of the file should work fine without chained redirects as the other commenters suggested. I tested that here: http://htaccess.mwl.be/ and it appears to work fine using the following .htaccess - can you confirm with your developer that this is what they were trying?:
Redirect 301 /old.php https://www.clientdomain.com/new.php
RewriteEngine on
if non-SSL and one of these, redirect to SSL
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.clientdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] -
Thank you Will! Just one question, so if it's a simple redirect from one page to another, it would look like this? Or is adding [R=301,L] only for those that start with RewriteRule?
Redirect 301 /Bamboo https://www.fauxpanels.com/style-wood.php [R=301,L]
-
Hi Lori. The solution the other commenters have suggested is definitely the way to do this - so it sounds like it needs more debugging. I suspect it's to do with the [L] option being needed on the specific redirect once it's moved above the general http-->https redirect. This stops other redirects below it firing, if I remember correctly.
If that doesn't work, do you want to share back here the specific different htaccess files the developer has tried?
-
So the developer got back to me and said he had tried that but the redirect chain still occurred. Any other ideas?
-
So the developer got back to me and said he had tried that but the redirect chain still occurred. Any other ideas?
-
The easy solution (and recommended best practice) is to put the specific individual redirects above the HTTPS redirect in the htaccess file. Just make certain the legacy individual redirects point to the correct HTTPS version to start with.
It's standard procedure to have an htaccess file list the most specifically targeted rules first, gradually moving to the more general.
Hope that helps?
Paul
-
Thank you! Will try and let you know
-
I guess you could probably do this by checking the https rule at last. So if it is old.php, the first thing you do is redirect to the new.php but already on the https. So all your static redirects will automatically go to https with one redirect while the other will always reach the last rule and go to the secure versions. Let me know if this helps.
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
-
Google Is Indexing my 301 Redirects to Other sites
Long story but now i have a few links from my site 301 redirecting to youtube videos or eCommerce stores. They carry a considerable amount of traffic that i benefit from so i can't take them down, and that traffic is people from other websites, so basically i have backlinks from places that i don't own, to my redirect urls (Ex. http://example.com/redirect) My problem is that google is indexing them and doesn't let them go, i have tried blocking that url from robots.txt but google is still indexing it uncrawled, i have also tried allowing google to crawl it and adding noindex from robots.txt, i have tried removing it from GWT but it pops back again after a few days. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cuarto7150 -
How long should I keep the 301 redirect file
We've setup an new site and many pages don't exist anymore (clean up done). But for many of them we have new pages with new url's. We've monitored the 404 and have now many URL's redirected with 301 (apache file). How long should we keep this in place? Checking all links manually to see of new url is in place of the old url (in google) is too much work. tx!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KBC0 -
Pages that 301 redirect to a 404
We are going through a website redesign that involves changing URL's for the pages on our site. Currently all our pages are in the format domain.com/example.html and we are moving to stip off the .html file extension so it would just be domain.com/example We have thousands of pages as the site deals with news so building a redirect for each individual page isn't really feasible. My plan is to have a generic rewrite rule that redirects any page that ends .html to the stripped off version of this. A problem I can see with this is that it will also redirect pages that don't exist. So for example, domain.com/non-existant-page.html would 301 to domain.com/non-existant-page which would then return a 404 status. What would the SEO repercussions be for this? Obviously if a page doesn't exist already then it shouldn't show up in the search engine indexes and shouldn't be a problem but I'm a bit worried about how old pages that currently legitimately 404 will be treated when they start to 301 redirect to a 404 instead. Not sure if there any other potential issues from this that I've missed either? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbb0240 -
How to properly implement HTTPS?
We are looking at implementing HTTPS for our site. I have done a little research but can't find anything recent, http://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-and-http-and-https is the most recent thing I found. Does everything in the answers still apply? Should I just do a 301 redirect to all new https? Or add a canonical tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Tracking URLS and Redirects
We have a client with many archived newsletters links that contain tracking code at the end of the URL. These old URLs are pointing to pages that don't exist anymore. Is there a way to set up permanent redirects for these old URLs with tracking code? We have tried and it doesn't seem to work. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BopDesign0 -
How to conduct catch 301 redirects & have the separate 301 redirects for the key pages
Hi, We've currently done a site migration mapping and 301 redirecting only the sites key pages. However two GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) is picking a massive amount of 404 areas and there has been some drop in rankings. I want to mitigate the site from further decline, and hence thought about doing a catch 301 - that is 301 redirecting the remaining pages found on the old site back to the home page, with the future aim of going through each URL one by one to redirect them to the page which is most relevant. Two questions, (1) can I do a catch 301 and if so what is the process and requirements that I have to give to the developer? (2) How do you reduce the number of increasing 404 errors from a site, despite doing 301 redirects and updating links on external linking sites. Note: The server is apache and the site is hosted on Wordpress platform. Regards, Vahe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vahe.Arabian0 -
301 redirect and improved ranking
I was wondering if a 301 redirect will improve my ranking. My subpages use to redirect to my homepage ( all the subpages of my site redirecting to my homepage) and my homepage use to have no redirect from non www.to www. ( other than thru google webmaster tools. I am sure why it was like this for my subpages... I was wondering if I can expect some improvements in ranking now that the redirect goes from the none www. to the www version of each subpage and not to the homepage. By the way what was the issue ( was I telling google ) by re-directing all my subpages to the homepage ? was I making google think that my subpages and my homepage were all the same ? was I sending all the link juice from the subpages to my homepage ? etc... Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
302 redirect
Aloha, I do a small study of 302 redirects. I wonder if you have any examples of sites where the use of a 302 is made.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | android_lyon
For example, to ski resorts: where there is a summer version and a winter version. In this case, the field of 302 will return the version of the relevant season. ex: http://www.valmorel.com/ >> 302 >> http://www.valmorel.com/fr/hiver/accueil-hiver.html I wonder if the use of 302 is the right solution.
What do you think? D.0