Forum Moderators: phranque
We recently took over a site that has 3 extra urls pointing to the main domain. One was a former competitor that they bought several months ago, and the other two are big keywords for their industry.
The old web host was using "web forwarding" from Network Solutions to redirect the domains. This came up as a 302 Temporary response.
I wanted to do a 301 Permanent redirect on these domains, unfortunately the new web host had problems with this.
First they did not understand what I wanted. Second they did not believe it was worth it. Third they didn't know how to do it.
Essentially, this host was not one that I would use, but they are kind of "partners" with my boss, and really this seems to be a part-time thing with them. Each one of them is a networking guru at their day jobs, but that knowledge doesn't seem to transfer over seamlessly into web hosting.
Anyway, I'm not in a position to get rid of them, nor do I have access to the server to effect changes myself. Even if I did, they are using a Microsoft IIS server, which I'm not that familiar with.
Even so, a somewhat heated exchange took place, and they finally agreed to do it. So doing a quick search, I found a set of instructions with screen shots and everything to show them step-by-step how to do it with their server.
That was about 3 weeks ago.
Finally today it is done. Needless to say I would have taken care of this a whole lot quicker if it were my own website (on an Apache server) or other sites that we host at other places.
But just when I thought it was over...I see something else that I'm not sure is a problem or not.
Let's say I have:
www.example.com
www.example1.com
www.example2.com
www.example3.com
now, when I type in www.example1.com, it DOES indeed 301 redirect, but when it does, I get "http://example.com", instead of "http://www.example.com".
Is this going to be a problem? Could this site end up with a duplicate content issue or will this result in any other unfavorable situation?
Essentially should I get back on the host to take care of this, or is this nothing to worry about? Thanks for any help.
You need a 301 set up from non www of the main domain to the www added as well.
There's also no need to repeat redirects to include the 'www' prefix. This can easily be overcome with a regexp match.
Check out this thread [webmasterworld.com] for info
Since you are having so many problems on the hardware side of things I would suggest using an on-page server-side language like PHP to accomplish your redirects.
I wish I could, but the host will not turn on PHP for this domain unless they charge extra for it, as we initially told them that the site is static and will not need PHP.
Well, I'll just let them know that they need to change the redirect to go to "www.example.com".
As I mentioned before, I am not in a position to move to a new host.
