Very rarely, I see URLs with a host name of "ww8" instead of "www" (e.g. http://ww8.aitsafe.com, https://ww8.welcomeclient.com/). Though rare, this appears to be consistent enough for there to be some sort of logic or history behind this, but I have not been able to figure out what it could be about.
Does anyone know what the host name "ww8" stands for and when it is used? Or is this simply a random peak of arbitrarily chosen non-standard hostnames?
This is a subdomain system to identify subdomains. ww8 means that is the 8th subdomain. This system is used to balance load on the server side
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I have seen some sites use hostnames as data such as usernames (for example username.example.com) and was wondering how you would be able to achieve this.
Is it good practice to use hostnames like this or are there reasons against it?
Thanks in advance.
It is generally bad practice to treat hostnames this way. Lookups become a bit more complicated and it is always safest to use usernames in the path or query.
Hostnames are designed to be thought of in a global sense. For instance user.example.com/username/profile
It also helps protect the user (a little) because paths can be encoded into the http request where a subdomain request essentially requests user.example.com and that request can be redirected multiple times before returning to the client and dns monitoring is the number one way that people do tracking.
DNS tracking is easy because its already fast, open, and the contents aren't designed to be hidden like https or more recent ipsec techniques.
I've accomplished this by setting up a DNS wildcard with your DNS host (*.example.com) then using PHP to parse out the username in the URL and act accordingly.
I'm working on a site which shows different products for different countries. The current url scheme I'm using is "index.php?country=US" for the main page, and "product.php?country=US&id=1234" to show a product from an specific country.
I'm planning now to implement url rewrite to use cleaner urls. The idea would be using each country as subdomain, and product id as a page. Something like this:
us.example.com/1234 -> product.php?country=US&id=1234
I have full control of my dns records and web server, and currently have set a * A record to point to my IP in order to receive *.example.com requests. This seems to work ok.
Now my question is what other things I'd need to take care of. Is it right to assume that just adding a .htaccess would be enough to handle all requests? Do I need to add VirtualHost to each subdomain I use as well? Would anything else be needed or avoided as well?
I'm basically trying to figure out what the simplest and correct way of designing this would be best.
The data you need to process the country is already in the request URL (from the hostname). Moving this to a GET variable introduces additional complications (how do you deal with POSTs).
You don't need seperate vhosts unless the domains have different SSL certs.
I have a client who has brought a truck load of domains he wants me to redirect to his site.
A few of them are the same name with different top level domains (mysite.com, mysite.co.uk etc etc) but a lot of them are keyword related (mylocation-businessType.com etc etc).
I am wondering if either of these will be negative for SEO. I am thinking the top level domain changes will be fine, and expected by google, but the keywords might be views as a bit hacky?
What are the good people of stackoverflow's view on this?
If they are redirected properly then they'll have no effect at all. The only advantage will be if the name makes sense and a user might type it in. eg. identical names with and without hyphens.
For this situation all of the other answers are correct, you won't get any benefits in Pagerank, etc. and it wouldn't be useful except to pickup direct traffic to your domain names that you are then redirecting.
How would it affect your SEO though? That's a little trickier. Two ways of looking at it:
1.) Competitors could do this to you and it'd be completely out of your control. If redirecting a bunch of domains did any real harm to rankings it'd be a great way to do negative SEO, or "Google Bowling," and could be used to take down a site's rankings. That isn't the case though, so it probably wouldn't have too much of a negative effect.
UNLESS
2.) The nameservers for your redirected domains match the nameservers for your main domain. Pointing all domains to the same set of nameservers will help show that all domains are under the control of the same webmaster.
Even if you are using different nameservers and using 301 redirects as recommended, if the server with your redirects comes back to (at least) the same Class C IP address as your main site's server, a search engine would still be able to tie you together as likely being run by the same owner.
Either of these setups can identify you as the source of the redirects and devalue the ranking ability of your main site since there is a much higher likelihood the redirects are coming from you.
winwaed is correct. If you're doing a proper 301 redirect, the other domains are only valuable if people directly type them in. They won't rank, won't get any link juice, and won't get any inbound links. If you do seed inbound links, google will treat them as if they point to the target of your 301 redirect. It's a waste of time to just directly do that for SEO purposes.
The way to use each of those domains for SEO would be to build a bit of unique content on each one, get some inbound links, and then link out to your target page. Not really worth doing unless you really spend a lot of time at it, and google still tends to penalize obvious gaming of the system like that.
They won't contribute toward ranking, however keyword domains do get some amount of advantage for those terms. So, the way to use them is to build sites on all of them and funnel traffic to the main site.
Of course, they can also be used for extra backlinks, but you really want different C class IP addresses from the servers. For that reason you might want to go with SEO hosting.
Matt Cutts from Google explained it in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA
and here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a70ygsHgvMw
He also said if he was doing this, he would redirect each of sites to the target sites' different important pages. If the redirected domains had pageranks before, they will still flow pagerank (not exactly but a lower pagerank).
I need a URL to just test basic http connectivity. It needs to be consistent and:
Always be up
Never change drastically due to IP or user agent. (IE: 301 Location redirect/ huge difference in content... minor would be tolerable)
The URL itself has a consistent content-length. (IE: it doesn't vary from by 2kb at most, ever)
A few examples, yet none match all 3 criteria:
One example of always up: www.google.com (yet it 301 redirects based on IP location).
Another good one is http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en. but the problem there is that based on a given holiday, the content-length can really vary.
It might not be obvious; but http://example.com, http://example.net and http://example.org are actual, real sites; the might suit your needs.
Edit: I'm not sure about the specifics of their uptime stats and IP address, but I imagine these things, as well as the contents, are completely and utterly static.
Why not go to something like http://www.google.com/ncr? Then you won't be redirected
You could create your own website, at least then you will know that the content will never change and you you will know when its down?
I want http://mynewdomain.com to forward with masking to http://mysecretdomain.com/mynewsite. When a user types in http://mynewdomain.com/aboutus.html, he should see the contents of http://mysecretdomain.com/mynewsite/aboutus.html.
I do not want the public to be aware of http://mysecretdomain.com.
Will the way I use forwarding and masking negatively affect SEO?
By using domain forward and masking, is there any danger of people becoming aware of mysecretdomain.com? (ie. will users discover the relationship between mynewdomain.com and mysecretdomain.com?)
Additional details
It is extremely important that no one discover the http://mysecretdomain.com/mynewsite domain and directory despite the fact that it is hosting all the content. Do I have to do anything to ensure this?
Why not just map your secret domain to the ~/www directory on your host, and the new domain to ~/www/newdomain? Then when you go to mysecretdomain.com/newdomain/ it looks in ~/www/newdomain/... exactly what you described, with no redirects.
Maybe I don't understand your goal here.