301 redirect - different registrar and host

[lk125]

Help I am in 301 redirect he!.

The site is hosted with Dotster (windows) and registered with GoDaddy. I am trying to set sitename.com to permanently 301 redirect to www.sitename.com. In the GoDaddy control panel there is an option to do the forward, and I have set it, but it doesn't work.

I have called GoDaddy twice today and Dotster twice today, and each time the one tells me to talk to the other. No one even knows what a 301 is.

On a sidenote I have fixed the issue with Google in Webmaster tools by verifying both urls and selecting the preferred domain, but I want to fix this issue for other search engines that may treat the urls as duplicate content.

Any advice?

[encyclo]

If the DNS is managed by Dotster (check your nameservers), then the redirect function at Godaddy will not have any effect, because requests do not reach their network. So (assuming my initial assertion is correct) this situation the 301 redirect needs to be handled by the hosting company and not the domain registrar.

What kind of server environment does your hosting company offer - ie. is it shared or dedicated Windows hosting? Are you using .NET, ASP, PHP... or static HTML? There are multiple ways of generating a 301 redirect, but they depend on what tools you have on hand.

[lk125]

Yep DNS is managed by Dotster. It's shared Windows hosting, and .NET, ASP, PHP, HTML, etc are all available and setup via the hosting.

[encyclo]

Are you using any of .NET, ASP or PHP for your site? If you are, you can issue a conditional redirect when generating a page by modifying your script. If you are using plain HTML then your options are more limited.

[lk125]

The site is just html except a contact us form/auto reply generator that I have setup in php.

[encyclo]

If you are on shared hosting, there is little you can do in this situation short of using absolute links for everything. Windows IIS servers are less capable than servers running Apache - in the medium-term, you should perhaps look to moving to an Apache host.

If you have a dedicated machine, look into installing the commercially-available ISAPI rewrite module.

[lk125]

Thanks for your help, and that is kind of what I was figuring. It's strange that such a common problem with search engines is so difficult to fix.

There is, what I think to be, a Google work-around for anyone else having these issues. If you verify both your www. and no-www urls in Google Webmaster Tools, then you can go into Site Configuration, Settings and choose which is your preferred domain for Google to index. Unfortunately this doesn't apply to other search engines.