Blog subdomain not redirecting
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
Take a copy of the htaccess file, if something goes wrong, then you can always go back
-
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.
-
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
-
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 uniformyou only need one rule
If not wearing school uniform, you must wear the school uniform -
in htaccess "!" means not so try this
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]also when using regex special chars like "." should be escaped with "" see above www.domain.com
-
Here's the only (remotely) relevant entry I have in my .htaccess file (replacing my actual domain with <domain>):</domain>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^<domain>.com$
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
-
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 redirectYou can do this in one redirect following the logic
if not www.domain.com then redirect to www.domain.com -
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.)
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
Let us know what you find.
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Someone redirected his website to ours
Hi all, I have strange issue as someone redirected website http://bukmachers.pl to ours https://legalnibukmacherzy.pl We don't know exactly what to do with it. I checked backlinks and the website had some links which now redirect to us. I also checked this website on wayback machine and back in 2017 this website had some low quality content but in 2018 they made similar redirection to current one but to different website (our competitor). Can such redirection be harmful for us? Should we do something with this or leave it, as google stop encouraging to disavow low quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kahuna_Charles1 -
Preserve domain on 301 redirect?
We have a domain solely used for print advertising that does a 301 redirect to a landing page (a department home page) on our "real" domain that is indexed on Google. Example: www.bmwrepairs.com redirects to www.repairshop.com/bmwrepairs. Is there a way to do a 301 redirect so that when they get redirected, the URL in the browser address bar remains www.bmwrepairs.com?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jazee1 -
Going from 302 redirect to 301 redirect weeks after changing URL structure
I made a small change on an ecommerce site that had big impacts I didn't consider... About six weeks ago in an effort to clean up one of many SEO-related problems on an ecommerce site, I had a developer rewrite the URLs to replace underscores with hyphens and redirect all pages throughout the site to that page with the new URL structure. We didn't immediately update our sitemap to reflect the changes (bad!) and I just discovered all the redirects are 302s... Since these changes, most of the pages have a page authority of 1 and we have dropped several spots in organic search. If we were to setup 301 redirects for the pages that we changed the URL structure would there be any changes in organic search placement and page authority or is it too late?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16116990439410 -
Should I redirect 404s or should I eliminate them?
Hello! I am now checking a website that has been migrated months ago from osCommerce to Prestashop.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
While I was checking crawl errors in search console I found a lot of 404s coming from the last website. The urls are mainly 4 types: popup_image.php?pID=125&osCsid=507c27261ba5ca2568f06ce5bad2ebc9 product-friendly-url-pr-125%3FosCsid.... product-friendly-url-p-125%3FosCsid..... products_new.php?page=228 I've have realized that the parameter pId, and the number that comes after pr- and p- is the product Id in the new website, so I think our team will be able to create an script to redirect those. My question is: Is it ok to send several urls to the same url?. I mean, the popup_image.php was not the product page, as its name says it's more like a popup page. We don't have now a pop up page for images, so I was thinking to send that url to the product page. the one with the pr- was product review page the one with the p- was the product page I was thinking on redirecting the 3 of them to the product page? Should I? Or should I just redirect the last one (p-) and eliminate the others from the index? And... the ones with products_new.php?page=228 I was thinking to redirect all to the page 1 of new products. Is it ok? thank you!0 -
Why is this url redirecting to our site?
I was doing an audit on our site and searching for duplicate content using some different terms from each of our pages. I came across the following result: www.sswug.org/url/32639 redirects to our website. Is that normal? There are hundreds of these url's in google all with the exact same description. I thought it was odd. Any ideas and what is the consequence of this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Blog Integration
I have a blog and website, .. I have it under the same domain but it has its own login and dashboard ect..I would like to fully integrate it to my website so it becomes a part of my main navigation... If anyone know's how to do this or even has an idea on where to start it is greatly appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach0 -
Canonical tags required when redirecting?
Hello, My client bought a new domain and he wants it to be the main domain of his company. His current domain though has been online for 10 years and ranks pretty well on a few keywords. I feel it is necessary to redirect the old domain to the new one to take advantage of its ranking and avoid any broken links. The sites are exactly the same. Same sections and same content. Is it necessary to place canonical tags on one of the sites to avoid duplicate content/sites? Any thoughts? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eblan0 -
Should I redirect secondary keyword page
I have a reasonably high authority home page and have decided to optimise the home page to target a competitive keyword that previously had a specific page that was optimised on an internal page of my site that I have spent time building links to. The internal page has over 200 links to it so should I 301 redirect this internal page to the home page. Will that increase the auhority of the home page further? Or should I keep the internal page as a 'secondary' page for that keyword?. If I do have two pages don't I risk confusing google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0