There has been a question made towards me recently to do the following:
We have a website with Drupal running in IIS.
On that site is an URL Redirect to a website hosted externally, obviously with a name completely irrelevant to the name of our company.
The question now is the following;
They want to change to URL to a subdomain of our website. Example: from "www.external-site.com" to "www.sub.internal.com" (while still showing content of the external website)
They want the current page of that website to be reflected in the URL bar. So it wouldn't say "www.sub.internal.com", but it would say "www.sub.internal.com/solutions/page1.html" (instead of "www.external-site.com/solutions/page1.html")
It's possible that I forgot another 'condition' but have mentioned before this.
So, if someone visits through our URL Redirect to External-website, it needs to show our subdomain instead of their domain in the URL, AND it needs to show the current page when people start browsing while still using our subdomain in the URL.
Now, I checked the external-website, and it seems that most of the links available are relative links (if this would be any useful information).
Currently, the external website is hosted externally, and will remain to be so for next few years. (I believe we bought the company)
I have been asking around and looking up, and the best possible thing seems to use domain forwarding, but even then it still doesn't seem to comply with the entirety that they asked of me.
I am but a 'simple' .NET programmer, held responsible to do support for anything involving the websites, and I can't say I have extended knowledge about infrastructure. (But I can ask people to do this for me)
Is there anything that could solve this?
Thanks so much!
IIS's URL rewite and Application Request Routing (ARR) combo can help you what you want to achive. Here are few links which may guide you to configure ARR. Please note that these links dont exibit exact solution to your problem however you can take clue from it and fabricate your solution accordingly.
http://www.iis.net/learn/extensions/url-rewrite-module/reverse-proxy-with-url-rewrite-v2-and-application-request-routing
http://www.iis.net/learn/extensions/url-rewrite-module/reverse-proxy-rule-template
It sounds like you'll want to use a full-page iframe: do not redirect but show a page with an "inner page" instead: that inner page is the external web site. That way, users do not see the external site in their URL bar.
http://webdesign.about.com/od/iframes/a/aaiframe.htm
You need to configure the equivalent of Apache Virtual Host with Reverse Proxy on IIS.
See this answers:
https://serverfault.com/a/271030
and
https://stackoverflow.com/a/10003306/2131693
Related
I have a website ranking well in Google, my current website has dashes in and looks like so...
this-is-mine.com
Ive just also bought
thisismine.com
I'd like to point the latter to my first site, but I dont want it to be classed as duplicate content.
I'm unsure if I just do this through 123-reg but will this affect my Google rankings, or is there a correct way of doing this without penalising myself?
According to the link below, my thoughts are confirmed.
A 301 is fine as it forwards everything including page rank to the "new" site. In your case this-is-mine.com.
A 302 could/would be a problem for SEO.
http://seo-hacker.com/301-302-redirect-affect-seo/
If your current website is ranking well then don't disturb it. There is no benefits in pointing multiple domains on one website. You can also make a single page website on the new domain and optimize it for Google and link with your old one.
If you still want to do this then do a 301 redirect but make sure that the domain is new and has no spammy back links pointing to it.
i am a user, and i type: www.japsomething.com, that url doesn't exist however there is a folder called "something" and i want this url to point to that folder?
do i need to purchase the domain name for this to work or i can use .htaccess?
i still would like to preserve the url. so this means, even though i am coming from
www.japsomething.com the url should still say www.japsomething.com and when i click anything on the site it should say www.japsomething.com/anything/
another question is, how can i detect based on the users ip that i want to show them a spanish site, or an english site?
thanks for your responses.
do i need to purchase the domain name for this to work or i can use .htaccess?
You need to purchase the domain name, because otherwise when someone types: www.japsomething.com, their DNS is going to try to look that name up, and if you don't own that domain, the request is never going to reach your server, thus, your htaccess file is never even used. Because you don't own every domain that starts with "jap" and ends with ".com", you can't use htaccess to do this.
i still would like to preserve the url. so this means, even though i am coming from www.japsomething.com the url should still say www.japsomething.com and when i click anything on the site it should say www.japsomething.com/anything/
If you own the "japsomething.com" domain, you simply point it to the server and directory that contains all the content, and then be done with it. No htaccess trickery is involved here. If you went out and bought the "japsomethingelse.com" domain, simply point it to the directory that serves that.
another question is, how can i detect based on the users ip that i want to show them a spanish site, or an english site?
See mod_geoip2 for downloads and examples.
I've been asked by a family friend to completely overhaul the website for their business. I've designed my own website, so I know some of the basics of web design and development.
To work on their website from my own home, I know I'll need to FTP into their server, and therefore I'll need their FTP credentials, as well as their CMS credentials. I'm meeting with them in a couple of days and I don't want to look like a moron! Is there anything else I need to ask them for during our first meeting (aside from what they want in their new site, etc.) before I start digging into it?
Thanks!
From an SEO point of view, you should be concerned with 301 redirects as (i suppose) some or all URL adressess will change (take a different name, be removed and etc)
So, after you`ve created a new version of the site - and before you put it online - you should go ahead and list all "old site" URLs and decide, preferably for each one, it's new status (unchanged or redirected and if so - to what URL).
Mind that even is the some content will not re-appear on the new site, you still have to redirect the URL (say to HomePage) to keep link juice and SERP rankings.
Also, for a larger sites, (especially dynamic sites) try looking for URL patterns for bulk redirects. For example, if you see that google indexes 1,000 index.php?search=[some-key-word] pages, you don`t need to redirect each one individually as these are probably just search result pages that can be grouped with REGEX to be redirected to main search result page.
To index "old site" URLs you should:
a. site:domainname.com in Google (then set the SERP to 100 results and scaped manually of with Xpath)
b. Xenu or other site crawler (some like screamingfrog) to get a list of all URLs.
c. combine the lists in excel and remove all duplicates.
If you need help with 301 redirects you can start with this link:
http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php/
If the website is static, knowing html, css and javascript along with FTP credentials is enough for you to get started. However if the site is dynamic interactive and database driven, you may need to ask if they want to use a php, In that case you might end up building this site in wordpress.
If you are going to design the website from scratch then also keep this point in mind.. Your friend might have hosted this website at somewhere (i.e. hosting provider). You should get its hosting control panel details as well which will help to manage the website (including database, email, FTP, etc.).
I've got a bit of a problem with Google's Change of Address function on the Google Webmaster tools. I hope that I got the right part of the Stack Exchange for this.
Basically, for six years I've been using a blogging platform blogsome.com (which hosts domains like http://site-address.blogsome.com), which is basically a hosted wordpress server. I've had no complaints about it, until they recently announced that they would close down on a very, very short notice.
With this, I found it a good opportunity to set up a domain of my own (let's call it http://site-adress.net for now). Setting up the domain and website went well, but when I went to Google Webmaster Tools to tell it about the change of address, this proved to be surprisingly difficult. In particular, when I tried the "Change of Address"-option on the dashboard, I get the message that this option is not available for subdomains.
What method would there be to correctly tell google that my site has changed? I cannot use 301-redirects, because 1) I do not have access to do that on blogsome, and 2) blogsome will be shutting down really soon (read: within a week; the news was on a very short notice, and I spent most of that time actually setting up the website). I've also read somewhere that you should keep your old site alive for 180 days, and again that is no option for me either.
The best option is to use a .htaccess file (plain text file)
And put this inside it and upload it to your site.
Redirect 301 / http://www.yournewdomain.com/
If you cant do that you might be able to upload a new index.php with the following inside it.
<?php
header( "Status: 301 Moved Permanently" );
header( "Location: http://www.yournewdomain.com/" );
exit(0)
?>
If you cant do that either, then say what you can actually do on the server?
Do you have any actually access to files? Or can you edit the templates?
You should be able to move it in gwt i'm not 100% sure, I never done it with a subdomain or a blog-hosted site. So I might be wrong here.
Add your new domain with the blog to your gwt account and get it verified.
Then in GWT goto your bloghosted site then to Site Configuration > Change of address
And then select your new domain under the "Tell us the URL of your new domain" part and hit Submit
my company is running IIS and DNN (I'm not a server guy, so color me ignorant), and I've read previous that you should either redirect your .http://www.mydomain to .http://mydomain or Vice Versa. Can anyone give me reasons to do this? (periods "prepended" to remove href)
From what I understand, it's because search engines see those as two different 'sites' (Even when visiting one or the other, I can be logged into one but not the other).
I also heard it can be a duplicate content problem, which search engines dislike.
Just looking for some professional insight, will help me and others.
Thanks!
This allows your site to be more SEO-friendly. Search engine crawlers will view these as two different URLs. That will cause your site's ranking in search engines to have multiple rankings for the same content.
ScottGu describes the problem and how to go about fixing it in a blog post:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/04/20/tip-trick-fix-common-seo-problems-using-the-url-rewrite-extension.aspx
Although it's mostly for SEO, there is also a potential usability issue in that a user who logs in on www.domain.com may get cookies that only work on the www subdomain and will be forced to log in again if they ever follow a link to domain.com (without the www prefix).
In addition to the SEO-friendlyness this also prevents some errors that might come up when both, with and without www works.
for example a user could login on www.yourdomain.com and would receive a cookie. later he visit your site via yourdomain.com and the cookie would not apply there.