I have a site (e.g. mysite.com) and old versions of the site under a directory are still appearing in search engines (e.g. mysite.com/oldsecton/something.html). There are too many of these links to remove from search engine finds.
I want everything in the /oldsection to redirect back to mysite.com/index.html
i.e. everything in the /oldsection should go to index.html located one directory path back
I have tried different variations of .htaccess inside /oldsection such as
ErrorDocument 404 ../index.html
ErrorDocument 404 mysite.com/index.html
etc...
None of them seem to be successfull.
This should be a simple task but I keep getting an Internal Server Error or a ErrorDocument error.
Inside /oldsection/.htaccess have this code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^ /index.html [L,R=302]
Related
I'm getting inconsistent results with what appears to me to be the exact same redirect. Can anyone see what I'm missing?
Here's my .htaccess file. You can see where I'm trying to redirect all of the contents of 3 directories to my file_not_found page.
The problem is that only one of the directories is redirecting properly. By "properly" I mean, that it shows in the browsers url bar that it's displaying www.hhoprofessor.com/file_not_found.
The bak directory works, but none of the rest do. For instance see the following examples:
When I type www.hhoprofessor.com/bak/random_file_name, it redirects to www.hhoprofessor.com/file_not_found. This is the correct behavior.
When I do the same with the other 2 directories, I get the following result: Typing www.hhoprofessor.com/inc/random_file_name doesn't change in the address bar, but does correctly show the content of the file_not_found page. Same result when I try the page subdirectory.
I need them to do a full forwarding like they do for the /bak subdir. I don't get why the same directive is not operating the same way.
I've tried this in Chrome and Opera and they both have the same behavior. Apache version is 2.4.33, and this is a hosted lamp server.
ErrorDocument 404 /file_not_found
Redirect 301 /.htaccess http://www.hhoprofessor.com/file_not_found
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
# Redirect directories to file_not_found.php:
RewriteRule ^inc/(.*) file_not_found [R,L]
RewriteRule ^bak/(.*) file_not_found [R,L]
RewriteRule ^pages/(.*) file_not_found [R,L]
# require www prefix
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^hhoprofessor\.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS}:s on:(s)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http%1://www\.hhoprofessor\.com/$1 [R=301,L]
# Homepage: / redirects to http
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteRule ^$ http://www\.hhoprofessor\.com/ [R=301,L]
One more datum that might apply: This is an addon domain and is in a subdir to the main domain. I've added the following line to the top of the main domain's .htaccess which is supposed to stop processing anything coming to the addon domain:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?hhoprofessor\.com$
RewriteRule ^.*$ '-' [L]
In looking through that file, I just don't see how it could be affecting this situation, even if the whole main domain .htaccess were being processed.
Can anyone see what I'm missing?
If you want to debug such behavior, the first reflex to adopt is to analyze network traffic and http headers. Thanks to that, you'd have seen that both inc and pages folders end up with a 403 (Forbidden) code. You need to change permissions on those folders (and files recursively, maybe).
bak folder test output:
inc (same for pages) folder test output:
BUT, from a SEO point of view, what you're trying to do is not good. You should only keep ErrorDocument 404 /file_not_found and remove your redirect rules. It automatically sends a 404 (Not Found) code without changing the url. Quick reminder: changing the url means redirect, in your case you send a 302 (Moved Temporarily) code instead of a 404, which is not the expected behavior.
Ok, this resolved thanks to Justin's answer. Although, I'm not sure exactly why. The file permissions and ownership across all 3 directories were identical. So, I still don't know why one worked correctly and the other 2 didn't. There was no permission or ownership problem causing a 403 status code. Dirs were 755 and files were 644.
But I tried making the permissions on all 3 of these dirs 700. After that, all redirects worked as expected. But, it's counter-intuitive. The incorrect behavior was giving the status code of 403 (forbidden). And then when I changed the permissions so that the directory was indeed forbidden, then it redirected with 302. Go figure. But it works.
By the way, I would up-vote Justin's answer more if I could. The tip to analyze the status code will help me with problems in the future. I didn't know about that one.
later edit:
I've removed all redirects and I'm only using the file permissions now. I set up the 404 and 403 documents and everything works fine. It is worthy of note that using the ErrorDocument directive causes these to be sent with a 302 code. But that should be find SEO-wise as none of these are linked anywhere. All normal pages have status code 200.
I have an empty domain, and would like to return a 404 error when people go to the homepage, or any other URL. Currently, when I go to the domain, I'm being displayed the empty directory.
How can I achieve that?
I'm being displayed the empty directory.
I assume you mean you are being shown an (Apache generated) index of that directory (which would appear to be empty). This is a "feature" of Apache. To disable directory indexes then include the following at the top of the .htaccess file in your document root:
Options -Indexes
However, this will result in a 403 Forbidden being served when accessing a directory that does not contain a DirectoryIndex document (because server-generated directory indexes are "forbidden"). To explicitly return a 404 for all requests, include the following below the above in the .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^ - [R=404]
This uses mod_rewrite to instruct Apache to return a 404 status (default error page) for all requests.
However, this does assume that you have not defined a custom 404 ErrorDocument (otherwise you'll get a 500 error resulting from a rewrite loop).
I'd like to cut off access to a subdirectory on my site but I want any access in the subdirectory to be a 404 error, not a 403 forbidden. How can this be accomplished?
Try:
RewriteRule ^directory/ - [L,R=404]
This redirects all requests for the folder "/directory/", they get a 404 response.
I think, 410 error better
RewriteRule ^directory/ - [L,R=410]
or my search:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (googlebot|bingbot|Baiduspider) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [R=410,L]
on russian wiki
404 Not Found [19] - the most common mistake when using the Internet, the main reason - an error in writing the address of a Web page. The server understood the request, but did not find the corresponding resource at the specified URL. If the server knows that there was a document at this address, then it is desirable for it to use code 410. Answer 404 can be used instead of 403 if you need to carefully hide certain resources from prying eyes. Appeared in HTTP/1.0.
Redirect 404
Put this into the .htaccess file in the directory that you want off the record. The Redirect directive is part of mod_alias and can be used to send any status code, not just redirects.
You could also for the time being change which page a user will see when confronted with a 403 error, but I wouldn't recommend doing this long-term.
.htaccess:
ErrorDocument 403 /your404pagehere.php
I have the following line in my .htaccess file and it works.
ErrorDocument 404 http://localhost/error.php?code=404
When I change it to either of these it doesn't work anymore (don't know which is correct):
ErrorDocument 404 error.php?code=404
ErrorDocument 404 /error.php?code=404
The .htaccess file and error.php are in the same directory. Why is this happening?
Note: I'm on Wampserver
FULL .HTACCESS FILE
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)$ $1.php
ErrorDocument 404 http://localhost/error.php?code=404
The reason this is not working is because of the query string.
When you don't supply a full URL to the ErrorDocument directive, Apache treats is as a local file path relative to DocumentRoot. Slightly confusingly, you do need to use the leading / even though it is technically a relative path.
Now, what you want to do is actually not as simple as it may seem on the face of it. Because you are now dealing with a local path, the query string portion no longer has a special meaning, and will be treated as a literal part of the file name - and obviously the file is not called error.php?code=404, it's just called error.php. Thankfully though, it is possible with a little bit of messing around, because ErrorDocument does generate an internal request which is passed through the standard routing engine. What we will need here is a little bit of mod_rewrite magic.
Try the following:
ErrorDocument 404 /error-404.php
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/?error-([0-9]+)\.php$ /error.php?code=$1 [L,QSA]
This assumes that your .htaccess and error.php files both reside in the DocumentRoot.
In my opinion, 404 (like 403, 502, ...) code is a HTTP code so it could be logic that the instruction ErrorDocument, which reference to HTTP process in your case, needs a http:// instruction.
Using DaveRandom's solution, I simply added the R flag to RwriteRule and it works.
Try this configuration:
ErrorDocument 404 /error-404.php
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/?error-([0-9]+)\.php$ /error.php?code=$1 [L,R,QSA]
For me it works on Apache 2.4.12
I have a htaccess file in a sub folder like so:
/subfolder/.htaccess
In the htaccess file the following code to set a 404 ErrorDocument
ErrorDocument 404 /404.php
The issue is the 404 page in the root directory is loaded rather than the one in the /subfolder/ folder. I can't simply change the htaccess file to use /subfolder/404.php because the system is going to be installed in lots of different places.
Is there a way to reference the files in the directory that the htaccess is in?
I just had the same problem and found you page...If you have domain/folder and want to redirect anything from the folder back to the domain's index, use ErrorDocument 404 /
...I'm not sure if this goes to the root folder or one folder up, but in your case (and mine) they are one in the same.
Hope this helps!