web.* vs. www.*

How to safely redirect / is it worth it?

[zwhalen]

Hello,

I'm working on a site which for some reason I don't fully understand is configured such that links of the form:
[web.department.example.edu...]
are equivalent to
[department.example.edu...] .

I want to set a 301 redirect to point all web.* traffic to www.*, and this is what I have so far:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^web\.department\.example\.edu
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.department.example.edu/mysite/$1 [R=301,L]

And that's in my .htaccess file which is at /directorypath/htdocs/mysite/.htaccess

(I hope that all makes sense)

So my questions are:

1) Will that redirect cause any problems that I'm not foreseeing?

2) Is it even worth it worry about this?

Regarding 2), my main motivation is that google has indexed about 1/4 the site as web.*, even though I don't think we have any inbound links that way. I'd much rather it all be www.*.

Any thoughts? Advice?

Thanks,
Zach

[Quadrille]

Wouldn't it be even simpler to stick to department.example.edu - neater, slicker - and the convention is for subdomains to omit the www, if only because it's shorter.

Or even - for less pain in the long run - www.example.edu/department/

But it is your choice; conventions can be ignored! :)

However, I have a lot of experience dealing with www.domains.edu - and the biggest problem many, many of them have is every summer, the site gets reorganised - every link goes 404, and they lose countless listings and many potential visitors.

What really matters is not the form of Google's listing - but whether or not the pages can be found! [lecture over!]

[zwhalen]

Hi Quadrille,

I hear you, but (I should have explained before), I don't have any access to anything at the departmental level. I'm a site under the department, so someone above me sets up the server. As it stands right now, the DNS server (I guess) doesn't return anything for [department.example.edu...] only [department.example.edu...] and [web.department.example.edu...]

Meanwhile my shortest route is [(www¦web).department.example.edu...] . (It's an electronic journal published by the department).

example.edu/department also doesn't work, as I understand it, because of labyrinthine bureaucratic policies on how school domain names have to work.

On the one hand, it's obviously kind of frustrating to not be able to control everything, but on the other hand, it limits my decision to www.* or web.* (or both).