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.
301 Redirects for Multiple Language Sites in htaccess File
-
Hi everyone,
I have a site on a subdomain that has multiple languages set up at the domain level:
https://mysite.site.com, https://mysite.site.fr , https://mysite.site.es , https://mysite.site.de , etc.
We are migrating to a new subdomain and I am trying to create 301 redirects within the htaccess file, but I am a bit lost on how to do this as it seems you have to go from a relative url to an absolute - which would be fine if I was only doing this for the english site, but I'm not.
It doesn't seem like I can go from absolute url to an absolute url - but I could be wrong.
I am new to editing the htaccess file - so I could definitely use some advice here.
Thanks.
-
You might be able to do this using the "RewriteCond" condition to specify the new subdomain paths. This guide should give you the basic template: https://www.hostwinds.com/guide/redirect-subdomain-using-htaccess/
Let me know if you have any other questions!
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
-
SEO for multiple languages [Arabic]
Hello all, I am currently managing a Marketplace that comes in two different languages: English & Arabic. The English website is, fortunately, doing quite well in terms of SEO performances but, not the Arabic one. The website has two kinds of content: Static content: controlled by me. It includes menu items, navigation, static pages etc which is properly translated among the two languages User-uploaded content: It includes ads/news posted by the user which may not be translated to Arabic if they chose not to do it. Now if somebody goes to the Arabic website and check a news item that doesn't have an Arabic translation, it will show the English title. I am assuming, serving content in a different language that is specified in the hreflang is a straight no, right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozammilStorat0 -
Multiple Ecommerce sites, same products
We are a large catalog company with thousands of products across 2 different domains. Google clearly knows that the sites are connected. Both domains are fairly well known brands - thousands of branded searches for each site per month. Roughly half of our products overlap - they appear on both sites. We have a known duplicate content issue - both sites having exactly the same product descriptions, and we are working on it. We've seen that when a product has different content on the 2 sites, frequently, both pages get to page 2 of the SERPs, but that's as far as it goes, despite aggressive white hat link building tactics. 1. Is it possible to get the same product pages on page 1 of the SERPs for both sites? (I think I know the answer...) 2. Should we be canonicalizing (is that a word?) products across the sites? This would get tricky - both sites have roughly the same domain authority, but in different niches. Certain products and keywords naturally rank better on 1 site or the other depending on the niche.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?
We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget). A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url. I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site. We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK7170 -
301 redirect subdirectory to new domain
I'm planning on using 301 redirects to spin out a subdirectory of my current website to be its own separate domain. For instance, I currently have a website www.website.com and my writers write tech news at www.website.com/news. Now I want to 301 redirect www.website.com/news to www.technews.com. Will this have any negative impact on SEO? What are some steps that I can take to minimize these impacts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris_Bishop1 -
Geoip redirection, 301 or 302?
Hello all Let me first try to explain what our company does and what it is trying to achieve. Our company has an online store, sells products for 3 different countries, and two languages for each country. Currently we have one site, which is open to all countries, what we are trying to achieve is make 3 different stores for these 3 different countries, so we can have a better control over the prices in each country. We are going to use Geoip to redirect the user to the local store in his country. The suggested new structure is to add sub-folders as following: www.example.com/ca-en
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajarad
www.example.com/ca-fr
www.example.com/us-en
... If a visitor is located outside these 3 countries, then she'll be redirected to the root directory www.example.com/en We can't offer to expand our SEO team to optimize new pages for the local market, it's not the priority for now, the main objective now is to be able to control the prices for different market. so to eliminate the duplicate issue, we'll use canonical tags. Now knowing our objective from the new URL structure, I have two questions: 1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections? 2- Knowing that Google bots comes from US-IP, does that mean that the other versions of the site won't be crawled (i.e, www.example.com/ca-fr), this is especially important for us as we are using AdWords, and unindexed pages will effect our quality score badly. I'd like to know if you have other account structure in your mind that would be better than this proposed structure. Your help is highly highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.0 -
.htaccess 301 Redirect Help! Specific Redirects and Blanket Rule
Hi there, I have the following domains: OLD DOMAIN: domain1.co.uk NEW DOMAIN: domain2.co.uk I need to create a .htaccess file that 301 redirects specific, individual pages on domain1.co.uk to domain2.co.uk I've searched for hours to try and find a solution, but I can't find anything that will do what I need. The pages on domain1.co.uk are all kinds of filenames and extensions, but they will be redirected to a Wordpress website that has a clean folder structure. Some example URL's to be redirected from the old website: http://www.domain1.co.uk/charitypage.php?charity=357 http://www.domain1.co.uk/adopt.php http://www.domain1.co.uk/register/?type=2 These will need to be redirected to the following URL types on the new domain: http://www.domain2.co.uk/charities/ http://www.domain2.co.uk/adopt/ http://www.domain2.co.uk/register/ I would also like a blanket/catch-all redirect from anything else on www.domain1.co.uk to the homepage of www.domain2.co.uk if there isn't a specific individual redirect in place. I'm literally tearing my hair out with this, so any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages0 -
Redirecting one site to another for link juice
I have two sites with same theme - buying cars. I am going remove one of the sites from being crawled permenantly (ie junkthecars.com) and point domian via 301, to another similar theme site (sellthecars.com). The purpose is to simply pass the SEO link juice from one site to the other as we retire junkthecars.com.... Is a forwarding of the domain OK and the best way for the search engines to increase the rank of sellthecars.com (we hate to wast the link work done on Junkthecars.com)? What dangers should I look for that could hurt sellthecars.com if we do the redirect at a simple TLD?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bestone0 -
Is it safe to redirect multiple URLs to a single URL?
Hi, I have an old Wordress website with about 300-400 original pages of content on it. All relating to my company's industry: travel in Africa. It's a legitimate site with travel stories, photos, advice etc. Nothing spammy about. No adverts on it. No affiliates. The site hasn't been updated for a couple of years and we no longer have a need for it. Many of the stories on it are quite out of date. The site has built up a modest Mozrank value over the last 5 years, and has a few hundreds organically achieved inbound links. Recently I set up a swanky new branded website on ExpressionEngine on a new domain. My intention is to: Shut down the old site Focus all attention on building up content on the new website Ask the people linking to the old site to my new site instead (I wonder how many will actually do so...) Where possible, setup a 301 redirect from pages on the old site to their closest match on the new site Setup a 301 redirect from the old site's home page to new site's homepage Sounds good, right? But there is one issue I need some advice on... The old site has about 100 pages that do not have a good match on the new site. These pages are outdated or inferior quality, so it doesn't really make sense to rewrite them and put them on the new site. I call these my "black sheep pages". So... for these "black sheep pages" should I (A) redirect the urls to the new site's homepage (B) redirect the urls the old site's home page (which in turn, redirects to the new site's homepage, or (C) not redirect the urls, and let them die a lonely 404 death? OPTION A: oldsite.com/page1.php -> newsite.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndreVanKets
oldsite.com/page2.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION B: oldsite.com/page1.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page2.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION 😄 oldsite.com/page1.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page2.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page3.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page4.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page5.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com -> newsite.com My intuition tells me that Option A would pass the most "link juice" to my new site, but I am concerned that it could also be seen by Google as a spammy redirect technique. What would you do? Help 😐1
