Another question about the %20 problem.

This is driving me nuts

[elklabone]

We have a site that (did) rank very well...

We dropped from the rankings for no reason, but I did notice that when you do a:

site:example.com -asdfasdfsdf

That google had picked up several pages twice, all with the %20www.domain.com prefix...

I messed with mod_rewrite, now using
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com [R=301,L]

(I've also tried all of the combinations listed here:
[webmasterworld.com...]

With no success...

However, when I started, if you typed in
"space"www.example.com, IE would take you to:
%20www.example.com

Now, if you type in "space"www.example.com it takes you to the proper domain, so I was hoping it's fixed!

However, if you type in %20www.example.com, it still brings up the homepage, and the %20 is still visible in the address bar! ARGH!

My host seems to be baffled (or less concerned by this than I am).

Is my problem fixed? What could be the problem?

Tempted to cloak all "www" requests from googlebot from
%20www.domain.com directly to
domain.com with a 301...

--Mark

[edited by: jdMorgan at 10:34 pm (utc) on Oct. 14, 2005]
[edit reason] example.com [/edit]

[jdMorgan]

> However, if you type in %20www.example.com, it still brings up the homepage, and the %20 is still visible in the address bar! ARGH!

This indicates that you have "wild-card" DNS set up for the domain, so that all subdomains resolve to your host, and that your hosting provider has also set up a "wild-card" ServerAlias, so that requests for *any* subdomain are delivered to your "account" on that server. And these are good things, because it means that you *can* redirect those %20www requests to the proper "www" subdomain. You can test this by requesting "http://foo.example.com/" and see if that also resolves to your host and serves your home page.

If this is the case, then you can use either:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

-or-

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^\%20www\.example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

to redirect requests to the canonical (correct) domain name.

The first example says, "If the hostname is not blank and is not 'www.example.com', then redirect to www.example.com."

The second example looks specifically for requests using Google's malformed %20www subdomain, and redirects only those.

In both cases, the page requested by your visitor will be served, rather than the "home page."

Jim