Hi BaseKit,

What is the reason for there being so many 404's?

Did you move your site or rebuild your site structure? Do you have a lot of pages that are removed after a short time?

The answer to these questions will help to know what is the best approach for your situation.

Sha

Not having seen the code your programmer intends to use, that is not possible to say definitively. That is why we built the test for you, so that you can see the code.

If you take a look at the code you will see that the Rule is writing 301 redirects if the conditions are met.

A .htaccess file is read from top to bottom. The first condition matched will be the one used.

Basically, you have one set of files on your server, all of which have the extension .html.

When a request is made, you are asking the server to load  the .html file in the browser, but rewrite a "pretty URL" for the user to see in the Address Bar.

So, there are three possible scenarios for a request:

1. the user requests /page.html (server loads.html and rewrites the URL to /page)
2. the user requests /page (server 301 redirects request to /page.html, loads it in the browser and rewrites the URL to /page)
3. the user requests a page that does not exist on the server (server 301 redirects the page to /404.html, loads it and rewrites the URL to /404)

Personally, I would not be going out of my way to rewrite simple URL's just to remove the .html extension, but that is your choice, and I am assuming there is more to it and you had some good reason for doing this in the first place.

The one thing you need to be cautious of in making these types of decisions is that chopping and changing from one thing to another and back again is not a great idea. A 301 redirect should really only be used when you are sure that you want to make a permanent change.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi BJ,

From the information you included here it seems your programmer's approach is sound.

We made a demo for you with a working test and example code for the .htaccess so that you can check that it will achieve your aim in any likely scenario.

Take a look at 301 Redirect and URL Rewrite Example

Hope that helps,

Sha

Thanks for catching that Ryan! Having a bad copy/paste day

Hi Rob,

If you can edit your template, you could add the piece of javascript below to the head of each page on your site.

As long as the visitor has javascript turned on in their browser, this will detect that the page is rendered on the wrong URL and send it back to the correct page, outside the Iframe.

You can find more about this on this page (thanks to Ryan for catching the broken link)

There is a nice bonus in that you will then see traffic from referring sites in your server logs. You can very easily follow up with webmasters who have been duped into providing the links - show them how the other site has fraudulently acquired a link from them and suggest that they correct the link to point to your site.

I love it when I find a way to eliminate those guys with the other hats AND get the benefit of all their hard work!

Have a great day,

Sha

Hi Rob,

First of all ...this is not a domain redirect.

What they are actually doing is pulling the content of your site into their own using an iframe.

They are not able to do anything through your site by doing this as the content is rendered by the browser and not their server.  So, the question is why they would do it.

Best guess: This could be someone who is planning to set up some kind of low quality site (possibly full of ads), but wants to build up backlinks for the domain. They can go to blogs, forums etc and leave comments & posts with their URL. The webmaster checks the URL and sees your site, so approves the comment or post...after a few months of doing this, BAM! they remove the iframe and let loose their real content.

hmmm...

Sha

Hi Will,

The time required for installation and testing could vary according to whether there are compatibility issues to resolve on the server.

As an example - if we were to install an updated version of Wordpress for a client, that could be a 5 minute job, but the new version requires an updated version of PHP on the server and the age and configuration of the server may require patching (or even moving to a newer server) in order to install the correct version of PHP.

Then, with all of the software updated and the new version of WP installed, we would need to check and test the installation to ensure that the template is still good and nothing has broken.

So, a 5 minute job could easily turn into a 1 or 2 hour job and the need for the additional work will only become known when the installation is attempted (sucks to be us sometimes!)

For this reason, most web development companies will probably quote you a minimum of an hour to do the work. Having said that, the hourly rate you have quoted would be considered extremely high by our company.

I hope that helps,

Sha