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.
My .htaccess has changed, what do i do to avoid it again...?
- 
					
					
					
					
Hello
Today i notice that our site did not auto changed from without www to with, when i checked the .htaccess file i notice # in-front of each line and i know we did not insert it in there, after i removed it it worked fine.
The only changes that we did recently was to a mobile version to the site but the call to autodirect is in a JS and not in the .htaccess,
could it be the server..? is there any way that anything else might cause this...?
The site is HTML and WP could it be because of that...?
Thank's
Simo
 - 
					
					
					
					
Before you changed the file back did you see the last time it was modified? might give you a clue what happened. As Alan said check other files have not been changed (malware/hacked) again checking the modified dates gives you a clue ( files you know have not been touched having a recent modified date, all the files having the same modified date... etc)
 - 
					
					
					
					
Malware often changes the htaccess file, you should check to see if there is anything else in there.
WordPress sites are prone to being hacked. i develop in .net and have never ever had a site hacked, yet i see this is WP and joomla all the time.
 
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
- 
		
		
		
		
		
		
Why have my positions dropped after implementing recommended changes?
Hello! I have taken a Moz free trial and am really enjoying using this service. But, after implementing the recommended changes by Moz my rankings have really dropped. Is this normal? I was averaging around 17 but now averaging 40. Here is my website if anyone has any ideas of what I might be doing wrong, I would greatly appreciate any help.
Technical SEO | | NicoleChambers
Thank you
Nicole1 - 
		
		
		
		
		
		
Are there ways to avoid false positive "soft 404s" by Google
Sometimes I get alerts from Google Search Console that it has detected soft 404s on different websites, and since I take great care to never have true soft 404s, they are always false positives. Today I got one on a website that has pages promoting some events. The language on the page for one event that has sold out says that "tickets are no longer available" which seems to have tripped up Google into thinking the page is a soft 404. It's kind of incredible to me that in the current era we're in, with things like chatGPT that Google doesn't seem to understand natural language. But that has me thinking, are there some strategies or best practices we can use in how we write copy on the page so Google doesn't flag it as soft 404? It seems like anything that could tell a user that an item isn't available could trip it up into thinking it is a 404. In the case of my page, it's actually important information we need to tell the public that an event has sold out, but to use their interest in that event to promote other events. so I don't want the page deindexed or not to rank well!
Technical SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 - 
		
		
		
		
		
		
Resubmit sitemaps on every change?
Hello Mozers, Our sitemaps were submitted to Google and Bing, and are successfully indexed. Every time pages are added to our store (ecommerce), we re-generate the xml sitemap. My question is: should we be resubmitting the sitemaps every time their content change, or since they were submitted once can we assume that the crawlers will re-download the sitemaps by themselves (I don't like to assume). What are best practices here? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | yacpro131 - 
		
		
		
		
		
		
How to avoid instead suggestion from Google search results ?
Hi, When I search for "Zotey" in google, the following message is being displayed. Showing results for zotye
Technical SEO | | segistics
Search instead for zotey Anyone let me know how to get rid of this conflict asap? Regards, Sivakumar.0 - 
		
		
		
		
		
		
Blogger /blog Folder level redirect setup using .htaccess
We have a blog currently powered by the free blogger.com website. We have set it up as blog.example.com we wish to seti it up as example.com/blog how can we do this using .htaccess file? we understand how to update htacess, but we don't know what code we should enter to achieve what we want our website is hosted on Apache servers with plesk control panel
Technical SEO | | Direct_Ram0 - 
		
		
		
		
		
		
When you change your domain, How much time do I have to wait for google to return the traffic used to have?
Hello. 20 days ago, I changed my domain from uclasificados.net to uclasificados.com doing redirect 301 to all urls, and I started to loose rankings since that moment. I was wondering if changing it back could be the solutions, but some experts recommend me not to do that, because it could be worse. Right now I receave almost 50% of traffic I used to receave before, and I have done a lot of linkbuilding strategies to recover but nothing have worked until now. Even though I notified google of this change and I send again my new sitemap, I don't see that have improve my situation in any aspects, and I still see in webmastertools search stats from my last website (the website who used to be uclasificados.com before the change). What should I do to recover faster?
Technical SEO | | capmartin850 - 
		
		
		
		
		
		
Wordpress Redirect Plugin Vs Manual .htaccess?
Hi everyone, I need to 301 redirect my old pages to new ones but i am confused between whether to choose plugin for this or i should manually rewrite the code on .htaccess file. Please give your suggestion and if you think i should use plugin then which one?
Technical SEO | | himanshu3019890 - 
		
		
		
		
		
		
How to change noindex to index?
Hey, I've recently upgraded to a pro SEOmoz account and have realised i have 14574 issues to do with 'blocked by meta-robot' and that 'This page is being kept out of the search engine indexes by the meta tag , which may have a value of "noindex", keeping this page out of the index.' How can i change this so my pages get indexed? I read somewhere that i need to change my privacy settings but that thread was 3 years old and now the WP Dashboard has updated.. Please let me know Many thanks, Jamie P.s Im using WordPress 3.5 And i have the XML sitemap plugin And i have no idea where to look for this robots.txt file..
Technical SEO | | markgreggs0