We have set up 301 redirects for pages from an old domain, but they aren't working and we are having duplicate content problems - Can you help?
-
We have several old domains. One is http://www.ccisound.com - Our "real" site is http://www.ccisolutions.com The 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain works. However, the 301-redirects for interior pages, like:
http://www.ccisolund.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators do not work. This URL should redirect to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators but as you can see it does not.
Our IT director supplied me with this code from the HT Access file in hopes that someone can help point us in the right direction and suggest how we might fix the problem:
RewriteCond%{HTTP_HOST} ccisound.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule^(.*)$ http://www.ccisolutions.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Any ideas on why the 301 redirect isn't happening? Thanks all!
-
Yes, That is the best thing you can do. Because seems there have some other issues in configs. And we can not see from here about your all the configs. Anyway the codes we have given you will successfully work once you solve your other problems.
Best Regards
Prasad
-
Thanks Prasad for all your help. And thank you to Ersin also. We have solved the problem. Apparently, our URL re-write at the TomCat level was taking precedence over the .htaccess file. Once our IT director added the appropriate redirect for these domain pages into the URL re-write file, the problem was fixed and those pages now render with a 301-redirect to the correct page one the correct domain. I have encouraged him to write a blog post about this and put it here because there was very little documentation online about TomCat redirects tasking precedence over an .htaccess file.
-
Thanks Prasad,
We tried your suggestion because there was a lot of stuff [1220 lines of code] in our .htaccess file. We stripped everything out except your code, and still had the same problem. Our IT director is wondering if perhaps there is a conflict between the .htaccess file that operates at the Apache level and the URL rewirte file which operates at the TomCat level. He is wondering, does one of them take precedence over the other? In other words, could our URL re-write file be causing the redirects in the .htaccess file to not work properly?
I am thinking maybe we need to hire someone to look at the code in both files in order to figure out where and why we are having a conflict?
Dana
-
Hi,
I think you are doing so many mistakes. First take out all the other codes from your .htaccess file. Then copy only one code from me or from Ersin. While you have some other codes related to this domains redirection there may have conflicts. And your current code work for your root domains mean your .htaccess redirection is working. The problem is you have not used it correctly.
-
Thanks to both Ersin and Prasad. I appreciate your efforts to help very much. My IT director tried both versions of code without success. Here is exactly what he wrote:
" I tried the suggestions without success. I even moved the ccisound
redirects to the top of the file thinking that some other redirect was grabbing
it first, But no go, same results. Top level redirected, lower level not."Any suggestions as to why neither code succeeded at creating a "catch all." ?
-
cprasad's and my purpose are same, so our responses will work. But just some diffrences;
"<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">" line checks wheter Apache's rewrite module is activated or not. If it is then it runs the code after that. The second one is that my rewritecond lines are less than cprasad's, but they all same conditions.By the way, i have just tested it before I wrote it.</ifmodule>
Just do it..
-
Hi,
Do not worry about the differences about the code provided by me and by Ersin. Both are same in functioning. He have just added module activation tags in to the code. So you may use any code which you prefer and works for you.
And the answer for your question about the code you were using, it may not be initiate a wildcard redirection.
Are there more codes inside the .htaccess?
If you can post the exact code without hyper-linking any url then I can tell you the exact reason why your code does not do the job.
Prasad
-
Thanks Ersin,
Can you explain how your coding suggestion is different from Prasad's? I am not a coder so am just wondering if there's a different methodology behind the two suggestions?
-
Yes, a catch-all makes sense to me. what is the difference between your code suggestion and the one just below posted by Ersin A. ? Also, just for our own understanding, can you explain why the code we were using wasn't accomplishing what we wanted? (I just want to be able to explain it to our Web team). Thanks!
-
Hi,
The supplied url for interior page of old domain which you have mentioned not redirecting seems not correct. Because you have linked that text with the new domain. Anyway I have understand your problem. Your problem is
is redirecting to
but
http://www.ccisound.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators
is not redirecting to
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators
If I have understood correctly, the solution for your problem is, Do a wildcard 301 redirection. It will redirects all the inner pages to the new domain's inner pages. But all the inner pages in new site, must have the same paths as the old site. Hope you understand what I mean.
Anyway when look in to the example urls you have provided it seems both sites have the same content. So there is nothing to worry about. Seems you have just changed domain name.
So anyway use the following code in your .htaccess file inside your root folder
RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^ccisound.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.ccisound.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http://www.ccisolutions.com/$1" [R=301,L]First and second line do not write again if those already written inside your .htaccess file.
the above code will initiate a wildcard 301 redirection and will solve your problem. Hope you can improve the code for all the other domains you have. Otherwise post here. I will do it for you.
Regards
Prasad
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
-
301 Redirects - Clearing out a 300 Page WordPress Website (HELP)
I'm working on a WordPress website that has around 300 pages (not posts, pages), many of which have very little content and / or content that is super outdated with zero relevancy. The site has been up and running for 10 years and ranks well overall, 1st in many instances for competitive keywords. The company holds yearly events and works with various other companies who exhibit at their events. In their very early years, they created pages on their website for each of these companies, some of which don't even exist anymore. If I had to delete all of the pages that are deprecated there would only be 10 pages of the site left (with blog posts counted separately). Would it be safe to remove these pages and set a 301 redirect to a semi-related page without hurting the website rankings? Any and all advice appreciated!!
Technical SEO | | enimmo19970 -
How to handle pages I can't delete?
Hello Mozzers, I am using wordpress and I have a small problem. I have two sites, I don't want but the dev of the theme told me I can't delete them. /portfolio-items/ /faq-items/ The dev said he can't find a way to delete it because these pages just list faqs/portfolio posts. I don't have any of these posts so basically what I have are two sites with just the title "Portfolio items" and "FAQ Items". Furthermore the dev said these sites are auto-generated so he can't find a way to remove them. I mean I don't believe that it's impossible, but if it is how should I handle them? They are indexed by search engines, should I remove them from the index and block them from robots.txt? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | grobro0 -
New Page Showing Up On My Reports w/o Page Title, Words, etc - However, I didn't create it
I have a WordPress site and I was doing a crawl for errors and it is now showing up as of today that this page : https://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/event-registration/?event_id=551&name_of_event=HTML5 CSS3 is new and has no page title, words, etc. I am not even sure where this page or URL came from. I was messing with the robots.txt file to allow some /category/ posts that were being hidden, but I didn't re-allow anything with the above appendages. I just want to make sure that I didn't screw something up that is now going to impact my rankings - this was just a really odd message to come up as I didn't create this page recently - and that shouldnt even be a page accessible to the public. When I edit the page - it is using an Event Espresso (WordPress plugin) shortcode - and I don't want to noindex this page as it is all of my events. Sorry this post is confusing, any help or insight would be appreciated! I am also interested in hiring someone for some hourly consulting work on SEO type issues if anyone has any references. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | webbmason0 -
301 redirect after penalty to domain which currently 301 to the penalised domain
Hello all, As I have mentioned in another Q&A, one of our new clients got hit by manual penalty. I checked their link profile and there was a lot of black hat involved. Long story sort, I submitted a reconsiderationr equest which was not enough as it seems 99,9% of his links are bad links. We took the decision to move a newly launched web site from www.websitename.com to www.website-name.com with the latter being an old domain name with good authority and clean link profile. The problem is that at the moment the www.website-name.com is set to 301 redirect to www.websitename.com and what we want to do now is take the web site off www.websitename.com and launch (not 301 as we dont want to pass the penalty to the clean domain) it to www.website-name.com. What is the best practise for this particular case and are there any things i should pay attention to? I would appreciate your advise!
Technical SEO | | artdivision0 -
Duplicate Meta Descriptions From Pages That Don't Exist
Hi Guys I am hoping someone can help me out here. I have had a new site built with a unique theme and using wordpress as the CMS. Everything was going fine but after checking webmaster tools today I noticed something that I just cannot get my head around. Basically I am getting warnings of Duplicate page warnings on a couple of things. 1 of which i think i can understand but do not know how to get the warning to go. Firstly I get this warning of duplicate meta desciption url 1: / url 2: /about/who-we-are I understand this as the who-we-are page is set as the homepage through the wordpress reading settings. But is there a way to make the dup meta description warning disappear The second one I am getting is the following: /services/57/ /services/ Both urls lead to the same place although I have never created the services/57/ page the services/57/ page does not show on the xml sitemap but Google obviously see it because it is a warning in webmaster tools. If I press edit on services/57/ page it just goes to edit the /services/ page/ is there a way I can remove the /57/ page safely or a method to ensure Google at least does not see this. Probably a silly question but I cannot find a real comprehensive answer to sorting this. Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | southcoasthost0 -
How do I fix this type of duplicate page content problem?
Sample URLs with this Duplicate Page Content URLs Internal Links External Links Page Authority Linking Root Domains http://rogerelkindlaw.com/index.html 30 0 26 1 http://www.rogerelkindlaw.com/index.html 30 0 20 1 http://www.rogerelkindlaw.com/ | 1,630 | 613 | 43 | 110 | As you can see there are three duplicate pages; http://rogerelkindlaw.com/index.html http://www.rogerelkindlaw.com/index.html http://www.rogerelkindlaw.com/ What would be the best and most efficient way to fix this problem and also how to prevent this from happening? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | brianhughes0 -
Delete 301 redirected pages from server after redirect is in place?
Should I remove the redirected old pages from my site after the redirects are in place? Google is hating the redirects and we have tanked. I did over 50 redirects this week, consolidating content and making one great page our of 3-10 pages with very little content per page. But the old pages are still visible to google's bot. Also, I have not put a rel canonical to itself on the new pages. Is that necessary? Thanks! Jean
Technical SEO | | JeanYates0 -
Why this page doesn't get indexed?
Hi, I've just taken over development and SEO for a site and we're having difficulty getting some key pages indexed on our site. They are two clicks away from the homepage, but still not getting indexed. They are recently created pages, with unique content on. The architecture looks like this:Homepage >> Car page >> Engine specific pageWhenever we add a new car, we link to its 'Car page' and it gets indexed very quickly. However the 'Engine pages' for that car don't get indexed, even after a couple of weeks. An example of one of these index pages are - http://www.carbuzz.co.uk/car-reviews/Volkswagen/Beetle-New/2.0-TSISo, things we've checked - 1. Yes, it's not blocked by robots.txt2. Yes, it's in the sitemap (http://www.carbuzz.co.uk/sitemap.xml)3. Yes, it's viewable to search spiders (e.g. the link is present in the html source)This page doesn't have a huge amount of unique content. We're a review aggregator, but it still does have some. Any suggestions as to why it isn't indexed?Thanks, David
Technical SEO | | soulnafein0