My 301 redirect doesn't work anymore ...

Was working some time ago. Nothing changed. Why?

[GreenLeaf]

Hi all!

Recently i did a search site:www.mydomain.com and noticed that Google contains a whole bunch of urls with the domain that i'm redirecting with 301 to the main url.
When i created my .htaccess file for redirected domain i tested it in WebmasterWorld server header checker and all was Ok, i saw that 301 redirect.
Now WebmasterWorld server header checker tells that it see 200 Ok.
But i didn't changed anything!
My .htaccess :

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www\.maindomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) [maindomain.com...] [R=301,L]

It was working some time ago and doesn't work now.
What could be the reason?

Thanks in advance.

[jdMorgan]

There's nothing wrong with your code. You should contact your host and see what they have changed.

(Note that posting on this board removes a required space between "}" and "!" in the RewriteCond. This will cause a 500-Server Error if not corrected before use.)

[added]
I would suggest adding another RewriteCond ahead of your first one:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .

This will prevent an infinite redirection loop should a true HTTP/1.0 client try to access your site. True HTTP/1.0 clients will not provide a Hostname header, and this would cause your rule to loop.
[/added]

Jim

[GreenLeaf]

Thanks a lot, Jim!

One more question: do i need to have a robots.txt for redirected domain with the following content:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

[jdMorgan]

No. If you do that, then robots will never try to fetch the pages from the 'alternate' domain, and so will never 'see' your redirect to the new domain.

Jim

[GreenLeaf]

Thanks again, Jim, for your help!