I have a site that I'm building at the moment, and I just noticed that, while www.mysite.com.au works fine, mysite.com.au still points to the crazydomains.com.au holding page, even though I only bought a domain name off them, and am actually hosting it on PythonAnywhere. So I created a .htaccess file to add "www." to the front of urls:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite\.com\.au$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.mysite.com.au%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
However, mysite.com.au now gets "Server Not Found" as a response (www.mysite.com.au still works fine).
I've checked to make sure the CNAME record in CrazyDomains is correct, and to the best of my knowledge it is. PythonAnywhere doesn't officially support .htaccess files, so it might be that? Is there an obvious thing that I'm missing? Are there any alternatives to .htaccess that would give me the same result?
Related
I have two domain names bought mainly for SEO, I want to redirect them to certain pages on website of a different domain name.
I know I need to redirect them with 301's in the .htaccess.
But I'm getting confused, do I need to create essentially 3 .htaccess files one on each domain?
Thanks
No, you only need one .htaccess file per domain. However, be wary of including or excluding the www. in your URL, as you may render your SEO useless.
Redirecting to a non www. URL:
This assumes you are using Apache or something similar.
Open your existing .htaccess file using a text editor, and append the following code to it:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/$1
[R=301,L]
Where example.com/ is your domain. As far as I am aware, you can append any page to this URL with the same effect.
Redirecting to a www. URL:
Again, assuming Apache or similar:
Open your .htaccess file in the text editor, and append:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1
[R=301,L]
Again, example.com/ refers to your own domain. Again, AFAIK you can append specific pages without issue.
With most websites, www.example.com and example.com will take you to the same place. If you haven't made any changes to this, I would advise using the former example.
Additionally, if you are using Wordpress, there are a vast number of different plugins that can handle this for you. For example (and I am not recommending this over any other plugin), https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-301-redirects/
You may also hear the coderel="canonical" or see it from time-to-time. Some SEO professionals actually recommend this over 301, however with modern browsers and modern crawlers, this should no longer be an issue.
I am having an issue where Google Webmaster Tools is reporting a ton of 404 links to my site which are coming from ask.com.
I have tried to get ask.com to fix their side but of course they are not, so now I am stuck with over 11k of bad links to my site which I am suspecting is effecting my ranks right now.
Anyways I have a possible way to 301 them, but not sure how to do it with .htaccess.
Here is the bad link pointing to my site
http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/sentence-examples/fere-film/feverous/about.php
It should be
http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/sentence-examples/fere-film/feverous/
Besides the about.php there are other variations of endings as well, I basically need to be able to remove the ending.
Problem is that the URL after /sentence-examples/ can change. The beginning is always:
http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/sentence-examples/
So basically:
http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/sentence-examples/<-keep but can change->/<-keep but can change->/<-remove this->
This .htaccess should be placed on the folder before sentence-examples:
RewriteEngine on
# Redirect /sentence-examples/anything/anything/remove to /sentence-examples/anything/anything/
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,}\s/+(sentence-examples/[^/]+/[^/]+)/.* [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /%1/? [R=302,PT,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/(.*)$ /sentence-examples/examplesentence.php?havethis=$1&word=$2 [L]
Change 302 to 301 once you confirm it's working as expected.
If you have a CMS installed you might need a different rule to work along with it without conflicting.
Keep in mind that if you had previously tried different redirects using 301 aka permanent redirect its recommended that you use a different browser to test this rule to avoid the caching.
This is possibly quick and dirty but I've done a simple test on localhost and here just to make sure it works.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^sentence-examples/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)\.php http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/sentence-examples/$1/$2/ [R=301,L]
You can see that I've added wildcard groups (.*) to the RewriteRule so that we can pick up the elements of the URL that we need to aid in proper redirection i.e. $1 and $2. You can also use the third one ($3) to get which destinations are being targeted alot for your SEO needs.
NB: The rule above assumes that that the redirected URL will always be from a .php target and to ensure that you can redirect regardless of whatever comes after the 3rd URL segment replace the RewriteRule with this
RewriteRule ^sentence-examples/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)$ http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/sentence-examples/$1/$2/ [R=301,L]
I'm still a bit fuzzy on the working of .htaccess, and I've looked around but I can't find anything to help this specific issue.
EDIT: I realize there are other questions that seem like they cover this issue, but I checked some and they didn't seem to offer any help I could understand, and I didn't want to hijack them with my own issues.
This is what I have:
Options +FollowSymLinks
#RewriteBase /
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule /mp3/(.*) http://old.domain.com/mp3/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)$ /index.php?p=$1 [L]
As you can see from the last line, the string typed after the server name is actually a URL parameter and depending on that parameter, different content is pulled from the database and that page is displayed on the site.
The problem I'm having is that the client has a content page called "podcast", so they would go to site.com/podcast which should quietly redirect to site.com/index.php?=podcast and load the content for that page. Unfortunately, the client also has a real site.com/podcast/ folder on their server. Because of this, the rewrite is ignored and the browser attempts to load that folder. It either shows a file listing or a forbidden error if I disable the listing.
After some research (I'm still new to htaccess), I learned that the two lines prior disable the rewrite if the path points to an actual file or folder. Unfortunately, commenting out the one with !-d doesn't seem to have any effect, and commenting out both gives me a server error.
Admittedly, part of the problem here was lack of foresight. URL rewrites should have been planned before everything else was put together, but it wasn't until the site was basically completed that I was notified that the client wants "Friendly URLs" that don't include the ?p= part. Regardless, perhaps there is a way to fix this.
Is there some .htaccess trickery I can use that will force the rewrite even if the URL entered points to a folder (not a specific file) that actually exists? As stated before, removing the !-d doesn't seem to help, although I'm not sure why. Perhaps I misunderstand its purpose.
Thank you for any help, and please be lenient with me if I overlooked something obvious. This is an issue presenting itself on the client's live site right now so I feel a little rushed in solving it. Thanks again.
OH YEAH, and the solution can't be specific to /podcast. The way the client's site is set up, when they want to create a new subpage for the site, a new name is saved for that content based on their title for the page and it is possible (unlikely, but still possible) that another page can be created with a name that matches an existing folder on the server.
Here is a note from mod_rewrite documentation:
By default, mod_rewrite will ignore URLs that map to a directory on
disk but lack a trailing slash, in the expectation that the mod_dir
module will issue the client with a redirect to the canonical URL with
a trailing slash.
This explains why mod_rewrite ignores the URL /podcast. I would suggest that you rename physical directories so that do do not (accidentally) match article names.
Another option would be to disable the DirectorySlash setting. This will prevent Apache from redirecting /podcast to /podcast/.
DirectorySlash Off
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)$ /index.php?p=$1 [L]
Be warned that disabling this setting has side effects. Read through the documentation first.
Change the following line of code:
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)$ /index.php?p=$1 [L]
to
RewriteRule ^(podcast([^?]*)) index.php?p=$1 [L,NC]
My .htacces begins with
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
(I tried it also without RewriteBase...)
I tried all of the following rewriting rules to rewrite the URL
index.php?page=news
to
/blog
RewriteRule ^/?([-A-Za-z0-9]+)/([-A-Za-z0-9]+)/blog$
index.php?page=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)/blog$ /sites/blog/index.php?page=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ([a-zA-z]+)/([a-zA-z]+)/blog$ index.php?page=$1 [L]
Nothing works - no error. Mod_rewrite is installed and working. I restarted Apache and MySQL everytime I changed something in my .htaccess.
I also want to change my URLs which looks like this... index.php?page=single_news&category=release&id=9&headline=Beastie%20Boys%20III
...into: blog/release/9-Beastie-Boys-III
I am lost. Hope you can help me.
First of all, upload your .htaccess and other files (whole project) to some working, ready hosting server. And check, if your rewriting works OK there. This will let you know, if this is problem with .htaccess or XAMPP itself. I had many strange problems with using .htaccess locally, under XAMPP, that were magically gone, after files were uploaded to Internet hosting.
For example, I don't have working autorization using .htaccess locally, because right after I provide correct login and password I see exactly the same error message as you mentioned. As for me, I'm more than sure that this problem is purely related to incorrect interpretation of .htaccess done by XAMPP (as everything works like a charm on production server), not by some mistakes in .htaccess contents.
I wasted (too) many hours on finding solution and left it. For right now, if I'm developing locally, I rename ".htaccess" to "htaccess", so it is ignored by XAMPP (Apache on-board of it) and re-enable it only when deploing files to production server. This approach maybe isn't to professional, but it saved me a lot of time and stress! :]
On the other hand, if your hosting also fail with the same symptoms, then you'll know, that this is not XAMPP releated problem and you have something wrong with your syntax.
Take a look here for a similar problem reported on StackOverflow.com, where (as I think) the cause is the same as in your issue.
Here's the solution to change links from http://www.domain.tld/index.php?page=blog to http://www.domain.tld/blog is:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^\w+$ index.php?page=$0 [L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} index\.php
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^page=(\w+)$
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /%1? [R=301,L]
and for links like: http://www.domain.tld/index.php?page=single_news&id=1&headline=This%20Is%20A%Headline
the solution is:
RewriteRule ^blog/(\d+)-([\w-]+)$ index.php?page=single_news&id=$1&headline=$2
After using this code, links looks like this: http://www.domain.tld/blog/2-this-is-a-headline
For your first question, try this:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/blog$ /index.php?page=news
I have the following htaccess.
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www|m)\.DOMAIN\.com$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([^\.]+).DOMAIN.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://DOMAIN.com/index.php?id=%1 [NC,QSA,L,R=301]
The problem is that although it works I need it to still use the subdomain as the URL. So basically now I'm trying to rewrite DOMAIN.com/index.php?id=%1 back into SUDOMAIN.DOMAIN.com so the user sees the subdomain they requested on the address bar and not the http://domain.com/index.php?id=user
I'ver tried all sorts of things but always end up with some sort of infinite loop. Please help!
I already have a wildcard subdomain set up. In conjunction with the htaccess shown above.
The submain doesn't stick, it rewrites itself into the long string shown above. But what im trying to do is get the url ro remain subdomain.domain.com unfortunately the link you posted does peretty much the same as what I have posted above, doesn't really seem to be able to get the sub-domain to stick.
Any ideas?
Not sure if you figured it out yet, but your last line (I believe) should be this:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?id=%1 [NC,QSA,L,R=301]
If that does not work try this:
RewriteRule (.*) index.php?id=%1 [NC,QSA,L,R=301]
No expert but I have subdomains working from some other code I found. Hope it helps.
You need to change your DNS settings before. (A record)
There is already an answer for that question.