redirects not working on sub domain

throwing 404s

[Lorel]

Hi,

I'm trying to set up redirects for www cannonical issues, plus bogus urls plus redirect index.htm to index.html

the cannonical issue is working, but none of the others. They all throw 404 errors when they should throw a 410 or redirect to the home page.

This site is in a sub domain of the main site so I'm wondering if that is the problem or is there something wrong with the code below.

Also do i have the items arranged in the right order?

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^EXAMPLE\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.html$ http://www.example.com/index.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^index\.htm$ http://www.example.com/index.html [R=301,L]

[jdMorgan]

The rules are incorrectly ordered; Put them in order from most-specific to least specific. That is, your second rule should be first, the third rule next, and your first rule should be last, in order to avoid "chained" or "stacked" multiple redirects (Think through what would happen if the client requested "example.com/index.htm" -- You'd get a redirect from each rule -- The first rule, then the third, and then the second.)

Plus, your second rule appears to be self-defeating, and creates an 'infinite' redirection loop; The original purpose of this code was to redirect direct client request for /index.html to "/". As shown above, it redirects /index.html to /index.html, and creates a loop.

You should always link to and refer to your home page as "/" and the only mention of index.html should be in your (currently) second rule and in the DirectoryIndex directive of your .htaccess file(s).

Unless it is occurring as a side-effect of the 'infinite' redirect loop, I cannot explain the 404 error -- Perhaps you've declared a custom 500-Server Error ErrorDocument page, but that page does not exist? Look at your server error log file, and consider installing and using the "Live HTTP Headers" add-on for Firefox/Mozilla browsers; It will allow you to see the HTTP headers exchanged between your server and your browser, and may help to debug this problem.

Jim

[Lorel]

Thanks for clarifying the problems the above rules can cause, Jim.

Should I take out the "index\.html" in the 2nd condition?

[g1smd]

Which one?

Depends if you want to redirect "index.html" to "/" or whether you want to redirect "/" to "index.html" instead.

The latter is fraught with many dangers.

I would delete the third rule entirely, and reverse the order of the first two.

[Lorel]

I want all bogus urls to redirect to "/".

Here is why I was using the 2nd condition/rule in my post above:

[webmasterworld.com...]

I assumed if it was good for one site to catch all sorts of bogus URLs it would be good for another.

The 3rd rule is needed because the owner of the site renamed the files from .htm to .html

[g1smd]

As for the third rule, you should not be redirecting TO a URL that includes the word "index".

Again, that rule should not be last, otherwise you will end up with a redirection chain for some requests.

[jdMorgan]

> I want all bogus urls to redirect to "/".

If you care about your search engine rankings, all "bogus" URLs should result in a 404-Not Found or 410-Gone response, leading to a nice helpful error page that explains the situation and contains text links to your home page, site map, and site search page, as applicable.

Only the non-canonical forms of *valid* URLs should be redirected to the canonical form of the URL, e.g. redirect /index.htm and index.html to "/".

Catching *all* bogus URLs and redirecting them to your home page will result in an infinite URL-space on your site, and potentially-massive duplicate-content problems.

Jim

[Lorel]

Thanks much!