Recently while scrolling around the internet I've found a few websites that have w2 at the beginning of the URL instead of www. I'm not really sure of what the purpose of using this form of canonicalization may serve, other than just to be different. But after seeing that the Vatican's website also has it now, I'm starting to think it may actually have a functional purpose.
The Vatican's website has a lot of interesting redirects, but for me at least they all end up going back to w2.vatican.va as the base URL.
www.vatican.va redirects back there, google redirects there although it was indexed with the www.
So what is the purpose of using w2 instead of www?
The w2 is a subdomain, just as www is actually a subdomain. vatican.va is the top-level domain.
There are many uses for subdomains that usually come at the discretion of the developers, engineers, or administrators of a web site.
This is why sometimes you will see websites without the www (e.g. https://example.com). They have chosen to exclude the www subdomain. Most will pick one version to be their canonical and redirect the other to it.
In the example you provided, they chose to make their primary subdomain w2.vatican.va at some point and are redirecting (likely older) links from the www.vatican.va to the new one.
Additionally, the w2 domain may indicate that the web server is using IBM's CICS Transaction Server. The w2 may be it's default listener and the server administrators did not choose to change it.
Related
I have around 15+ sites, and we want to drop these sites and merge them into only one site (create pages for each one in the new site).
The 15+ site's domains should be redirected to one site as below:
a.com -> z.com/a
b.com -> z.com/b
c.com -> z.com/c
..
Also, we want to redirect (301) page by page from the old domains to the new the new domain to keep the page's ranking:
a.com/about-us -> z.com/a/about-us
b.com/about/abouus -> z.com/b/about-s
c.com/contactus -> z.com/c/contact-us
Each one of the 15+ sites is running on its own server with a different platform while the new server is IIS.
Currently, I'm thinking of two approaches:
Point the old DNS records to the new server of z.com, and handle all the redirects on the server.
Keep the old site running, and configure redirect rules on each server to redirect each page to the matching page on the new site.
Which approach is better, any other approaches? So far I think the first approach is better since we will control all the redirects in one place - but from the performance wise, is it going to add more headache on the server?
The Scenario
You created a new site and you want to redirect all old sites(15+) to new site (page to page).
All old sites are running in it's own server on different platforms whereas the new one is IIS.
Your options
Point the old DNS records to the new server of z.com, and handle all the redirects on the server.
Advantage
Less cost - you can remove all old sites and the server cost can be saved.
Internal redirection. So, time will be less
Disadvantage
Complex to perform
take care of conflict of similar pages(double check the redirection path)
Keep the old site running, and configure redirect rules on each server to redirect each page to the matching page on the new site
If you can afford the cost of running 15 different sites on 15 servers just to redirect, then only go for this method.
It is just a waste of money and the redirection time will be more.
I think eventually you'll have to shutdown all the other sites as in the long term unlikely does it make sense to keep 15 sites running just to do the redirects.
So as I understand the question is rather on how to better organize the migration to the new system in the short term. So here are my thoughts on this:
how huge is your system
what's your QPS?
how many pages do you have across your sites farm?
do you need to remap URLS for a decent amount of pages?
what's the migration procedure? Will you switch your sites one-by-one or it's technically infeasible and they all need to be swtiched over at once?
If we're talking about a system handling 10 QPS and 1K pages or about a system handling
50K QPS and having 1B pages we need to dynamically remap system load may be a concern and p.2 may look better
rollbacks
note that DNS records can be cached by intermediate servers and if you need to quickly rollback to the previous version if something goes wrong it can be an issue
what kind of systems do you have
Is it actually possible to easily extract URLs from 15 diverse systems and put them to a single point without a risk to lose something valuable?
ease of maintenance
At first glance the first approach looks easier from the maintenance perspective, but I don't know what kind of system you use and how complex the redirection rules need to be.
If they are complex dynamic ones like a.com/product.php?id=1 => z.com/a/iPhone6S moving millions of such urls to a single point could be tricky
SEO
I don't follow the industry closely, but a few years ago both would work ok. I think it's worth consulting those keeping up to date with this industry - it changes very rapidly
Your first approach is definitely the best.
It is easy to maintain
You needn't to keep old infrastructure (though in your second case you'll need to keep only redirecting frontend like apache, nginx or lighthttpd)
There are no performance risks as from one visitor request to old location, redirect answer and than request to new location will come in turn and not simultaneously.
DNS records are not capable of HTTP redirection which is crucial for SEO. To make sure your redirect is 301 HTTP redirect you can use sniffer.
The answer is just make sure your redirect is 301 HTTP redirect so you get your SEO right. Other than that it's just a matter of taste / architecture / money rather than standards.
UPDATE
Read more:
wikipedia
Both Bing and Google recommend using a 301 redirect to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results.
ehow.com
A 301 redirect is a search-engine friendly way to move a domain. The 301-redirected domain does not cause duplicate content in the search engines so that you do not harm your search engine rank. Using a new DNS setting is required to have a new domain name, but it does not redirect browsers or search engines. Both of these methods are used to move to a new domain.
webmasters.stackexchange.com
Duplicate content occurs when the same content is available on two different URLs. To prevent duplicate content on www vs no-www, use 301 redirects to redirect one to the other. To implement redirects, it is the webserver that needs to be configured properly. As long as DNS is pointing to the webserver (either CNAME or A record), then the webserver can be configured properly.
I was stuck with this problem some months back. I wanted to redirect a whole site into a new site's structure. The old site was .php which I know nothing about.
I figured I'd point the old website's DNS at my server and write some MVC code to catch every request, and then use a set of rules using the vb.net Like operator to compare the inbound Url with my ruleset.
It worked a treat. I redirect 300+ pages to my new site with about 10 rules. These include changes of folder structure, a forum (which was mainly junk but had a few good questions), and I implement a "catchall" rule which points to the new home page, in case I missed something.
It worked so well I've packaged it up as a commercial product and it publically available. It is free with link from the destination site (in your case just the single destination site).
https://301redirect.website/
There are a couple of demo videos on the homepage which will explain the setup in a few minutes.
What is best practice for doing this? Should I have duplicate content at each domain or should I redirect from one to the the other, i.e. all traffic to the .co.uk domain redirected to the .com domain?
Best practice is to send them all to one web server.
By default the server will not care which domain is pointed at it and will show the home page as domainx.com if you to it from domainx.com.
However there are two possible issues with this that come to mind:
The person who created the website hopefully only used relative links. (The contact us button points to contactus.htm instead of http://domainx.com/contactus.htm ) If not, some links might change the user from domainx.co.uk to domainx.com.
Search Engine Optimisation: Its better SEO wise if all the links to your site point to one domain name rather than appearing as several less popular sites.
You can get everyone on the same site by using a RewriteRule or 301 Redirect to the primary site. Or you can make every hyperlink on the site absolute and point to the primary domain.
I recently bought SSL for my website and want to create a section within the site in the form of https://secure.example.com/member/upgrade.aspx. However, I am having a hard time solving this issue since currently my website URL rewrite prohibits any subdomain and the user is logged out if he or she gets transferred to the above link.
I have search online and found some good information such as dynamically create the url without actually creating a subdomain in IIS.
Questions:
What steps are needed to achieve the objective above?
Should I have bought the wildcard certificate instead of one for a specific subdomain?
Thank you.
One option would be ignoring that url pattern for rewrite purposes or ignoring the url if the protocol is HTTPS. That said, I would take a slightly different approach here and just put the entire site behind SSL -- rewriting all the queries to the other protocol works and google is now giving rankings bumps to HTTPS so there are good business reasons to make the switch. You are already taking the pain of getting SSL involved at all -- the dedicated IP and certficate cost the same if you use them on a single page or all the pages, might as well take advantage of it and ease your management burden in the same motion.
I have recently set up my domain, but my problem is when I navigate with/without www, the results are inconsistent. They are supposed to point to the same page, but sometimes, the www site has broken links to non-www components (e.g.: when I load http://www.my-domain.com, and if I have a resource referred as http://my-domain.com/navi.css, it breaks)
Have tried 301 rewriting, but it's not always consistent. What do I need to do to ensure 100% uptime for my site?
This could be because of a couple of reasons:
Your DNS has not propagated yet, meaning if you recently just changed DNS on the domain name give it up to 48 hours and flush cache from your browser.
The domain DNS is pointing to different IP addresses from your www. or * A records.
There is a problem with the hosting configuration (unlikely if you are using CPanel or any hosting control panel as this is mostly automated).
Also you should pick either with or without www for consistency and better SEO results. Pick one and stick to it.
I want to move from one domain to another one that is shorter and (hopefully) easier to remember, but I also want the transition to be as seamless as possible.
I'm a coder so I know about 301 redirects and I intend to use them, but is there something easier than manually adding entries in my .htaccess file?
The website is static with the exception of the blog, which is under the /blog/ directory and powered by WordPress. I want it redirected to my new domain name. File and folder structures don't change. Isn't there some kind of wildcard thing for this?
What type of web server is the site being hosted on? If its on Apache, you can use the RedirectMatch command
Why not leave the web site unchanged, and [temporailly] let the both the old and the new domains assume the IP of the site, at the level of DNS ?
In other words.
Let the DNS setup for the existing domain as-is (for now)
have the DNS of the new domain assingn the particular server name to the IP of the web server (or preferablly to a 2nd IP, also assigned to this very site).
In a few months / whenever the old domain is soon to expire, check what residual traffic may still be using the old domain name (Old IP), and for them only, add a small piece of text somewhere in the UI to inform them of the new domain.