301 Redirect

[hitmann]

I need to test a page redirect. Could someone help me create a 301 Redirect that would redirect users accessing any page on a forum to the faq.php page?

[UKBusinessLive]

The smoothest way to redirect your visitors is to use an .htaccess redirect. This has no delay since before a page is served to the browser the server checks first for an .htaccess file... if it sees this the old page never loads, instead visitors are sent directly to the new page.

But bear in mind...

Always be sure to upload .htaccess files in ascii mode, sending it up as binary will break it (and usually make your server very, very unhappy.)

.htaccess does not work if you're on a windows server.

Make sure you triple check your changes. Clear your cache and look, test the server headers to make sure you see a 301 (that means its permanent) not a 302 (temporary) unless you are absolutely sure you really mean temporary.

Since some operating systems don't allow you to make a file without something before the "." you may need to save it as something.htaccess, some may even have to save it as htaccess.txt and change it once you've uploaded it.

Make sure your ftp program will show .htaccess files (FileZilla does and is free) It is a bit hard to edit something you can't see

Double check that you're not overwriting an old one (some servers already place one there for your custom 404 pages etc.)

Heres how to do it

To Move a single page

Quick, easy and seamless for your visitors.

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html

To Move an entire site

This will catch any traffic on your old site and redirect it to your index page on your new server. If you want to redirect each page to its new spot, this isn't the one for you.

Redirect 301 / http://www.example.com/

Changed file extension?

This example is perfect if you've decided to switch to .php from .html pages. It will look for any .html page and redirect it to .php (ie http://www.example.com/yourpage.html and redirect it to http://www.example.com/yourpage.php). Now, be careful with this, it does mean any html page. I did this on one of my sites and had totally forgotten I had an iframe with .html content on some pages... I didn't notice for weeks that it was broken
So learn from my mistake check, double check, then check again.

RedirectMatch 301 (.*)\.html$ http://www.example.com$1.php

Redirect www to non www version of site

It's best to stick with either always using www.example.com or just example.com. Allowing both can confuse the search engines. So here's how to force your site to always show the non-www version. (Search for "canonical url errors" in your favorite search engine for more info.)

Note: If you do use either of the next 2 codes below, and use a secure server (ie. https be sure to check that it doesn't redirect the secure to the insecure version. I'm pretty sure this will do that and that isn't something you want!

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

Redirect non-www to www

Same as above except in the reverse, this one forces the www. into your url.

Options +FollowSymLinks 
RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC] 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Redirect example.com/index.php to example.com/

Another snippet that I've heard is a good idea to make sure search engines don't give you a duplicate content penalty, this will also redirect example.com/folder/index.php to example.com/folder/.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
# index.php to /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3, 9}\ /.*index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.php$ /$1 [R=301,L]

Meta Redirect

I'd really advise against redirecting this way! Most search engine are having difficulties with this one (and spammers have been using this in very bad ways) and it might get your page in a heap of trouble! Some browsers also don't read it properly so your would-be visitors may get stranded. Seriously, it really isn't advisable to use this anymore but if you insist on trying it, here it is.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10; url=http://example.com/">

Hope this helps,

don't forget to change the example.com and yoursite.com to your own url


Take care