How can I make www.site.com/Item redirect to www.site.com/item?

Forum Moderators: phranque

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How can I make www.site.com/Item redirect to www.site.com/item?

cy182

6:37 pm on Aug 20, 2007 (gmt 0)

I created the subdomain: item.site.com , so item.site.com was the exact same website as site.com/item. I didn't know capitalization mattered, so I linked all of my web pages to site.com/Item. This was a big mistake because site.com/Item is not the same as site.com/item. Can anyone please tell me how I can make www.site.com/Item redirect to www.site.com/item? Thanks in advance!

dailypress

7:31 pm on Aug 20, 2007 (gmt 0)

you can use a redirect meta tag.
google search it.

phranque

11:03 pm on Aug 20, 2007 (gmt 0)

assuming apache: this previous thread on upper to lower case rewrite [webmasterworld.com] should be helpful.

tim222

11:22 pm on Aug 20, 2007 (gmt 0)

The purists will probably yell at me and I may need to hide my face when in public after suggesting this, because it's a sloppy solution... but you *could* make another copy of those pages at www.site.com/Item

cy182

4:52 pm on Aug 21, 2007 (gmt 0)

I listened to dailypress and Googled redirect meta tag. I found a great website that had this code:

<html>
<head>
<title>Redirect to the right page</title>
<META
http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.site.com/item">
</head>

</center>
</body>
</html>

It works great, thanks dailypress. tim222s solution will not work because there is just way to many pages to duplicate, plus the above option is simpler.

cy182

4:52 pm on Aug 21, 2007 (gmt 0)

I listened to dailypress and Googled redirect meta tag. I found a great website that had this code:

<html>
<head>
<title>Redirect to the right page</title>
<META
http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.site.com/item">
</head>

</center>
</body>
</html>

It works great, thanks dailypress. tim222s solution will not work because there is just way to many pages to duplicate, plus the above option is simpler.

phranque

11:05 pm on Aug 21, 2007 (gmt 0)

this solutions sends a 200 OK status document which tells everyone that this url is okeydokey.
using the meta refresh depends on browser behavior and is definitely not seo - especially with a 0 delay it can look like spam.
you really want to send a 301 Moved Permanently http status code in this case...

tim222

11:26 pm on Aug 21, 2007 (gmt 0)

tim222s solution will not work because there is just way to many pages to duplicate, plus the above option is simpler

Actually, if it was my website I think I would fix the links. But I agree with phranque that a 301 in the .htaccess file is a better solution than an HTML meta tag redirect.

Do a google search for: How to Redirect a Web Page
The first result is pretty useful. It covers different scripting languages.

Meanwhile, I'll bet that copy and paste suggestion is looking better all the time :)

valiweb

3:58 pm on Aug 22, 2007 (gmt 0)

This link will probably help you friend.

[webweaver.nu...]

Regards,
Val.

cy182

10:19 pm on Aug 22, 2007 (gmt 0)

Thank you tim222, the first result in the Google search was extremely helpful and solved my problem! Also, thanks to phranque.. . I did use a 301 Moved Permanently http status code in this case. Lastly, thanks to valiweb, your link was also very helpful!

Thanks to everyone!

g1smd

11:18 am on Aug 24, 2007 (gmt 0)

You can easily badly damage your indexing and ranking issues by using the wrong thing.

You need to take account of capitalisation issues, multiple TLD, multiple domain, and multiple subdomain (including www and non-www issues, as well as widcard domains that resolve) issues and use a redirect for all cases except the one canonical form that you do want to be indexed.

The Google forum has been discussing indexing problems caused by "Duplicate Content" for at least three years.

The Apache forum has been posting fixes for Duplicate Content issues for about the same length of time.

Don't rely on meta tags. Get the job done at the server level at the request phase, way before any content is going to be served.