I have a webpage whose information had to be split into two separate pages. I want visitors to inform of the fact that there are now two different pages, and thus serve visitors of the old single-page page a custom error page like
(Depending on who you are, ) the page you want is either of these:
*Link to page A*
*Link to page B*
This should be in HTML (to obey the general web site style).
The things that I'm unclear about are semantics and apache configuration
What HTTP Status Code to serve? There is 301 Moved Permanently, but I have more than one alternative to offer.
Is it possible to configure apache to my needs without a hacky LocationMatch or similar? Ideally, I would like to use the normal file serving semantics with the exception that the HTTP Status code should not be 200.
Thanks for the clarifying comment.
In answer to your two questions, I'd say:
Yes, 301 is the correct response to give. This will say that the old page was moved permanently, and will redirect the user to the interstitial page with the links.
You can accomplish this by adding a line to the .htaccess file in the directory that the old single page was once in (assuming you keep the new page there too). Or you can add a line to your main httpd.conf file. The lines would look like this:
.htaccess
Redirect 301 ./old_page.html ./new_interstitial_page.html
httpd.conf
Redirect 301 /path/to/old_page.html /path/to/new_interstitial_page.html
EDIT : Without any more context, this really does sound like a redirect scenario. In HTTP terms, the "resource" that was once available at the old location is now available (albeit in parts) at a new location, so you would "redirect" the client to the new location or to the interstitial page.
But if that doesn't seem right to you, you can try a "410 Gone". This says that the resource no longer exists at all, and instead directs the client to an error page. You can then customize the error page to contain links to Page A and Page B. Your .htaccess would look something like this:
# Enable URL matching and match the old page with "Gone" (G), "Last rule" (L)
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^oldPage.html$ - [G,L]
</IfModule>
# Special 410 page with links to Page A and Page B
ErrorDocument 410 /path/to/custom/410-page.html
Related
I have a custom made image gallery site that I converted to WordPress, this site have few thousands link like this
http://www.example.net/Gallery?cmd=viewCarGallery&carID=13&pgID=1
http://www.example.net/Gallery?cmd=viewCarGallery&carID=9&pgID=1
All link is now converted to wordpress and now I am facing problem redirect them, I tried to using like this
Redirect 301 /Gallery?cmd=viewCarGallery&carID=9&pgID=1 http://www.example.net/gallery/gallery_ID
Please help me how can I redirect this kind of URL.
A permanent 301 redirect in your .htaccess file lets search engines and others know that an old link has been replaced by a new one. It's the recommended method for directing traffic from an existing page.I added below codes in my .htaccess file.
Redirect 301 /oldfile.htm /newfile.htm
I think what you need is mod rewrite. Take a look here http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/modrewrite-tips-tricks.html
It looks like a similar question https://superuser.com/questions/155139/htaccess-301-redirect-with-regular-expressions
We want to migrate from CMS to own system.
Page addresses in CMS and own system are different. We want to use 301 redirect to all website's pages.
The output HTML of CMS and own system have some few differences:
OpenGraph semantic
No javascript generated by CMS
Should we be afraid the failing of search traffic?
If done properly, the 301 is the way to go when the url is changed permanently. The most common mistake our clients do is to change the URL of a page and never redirects the old page's url to the updated location. This causes 404 pages.
My advice is to structure everything. Start with generating a file containing all current URL of the website. Then use an excel file or google sheet and pages those in. Right next to that column add another one - this is the column where you decide what you should do with each URL (either keep, remove/kill, combine it another page or change the URL).
Since you want to change the CMS, I am not sure how your have structured your pages right now and how they are indexed, BUT whatever you do, make sure that if anything in the URL has been changed, use a 301 to permanently redirect the old URL to the new location. Otherwise if that page receives some traffic, you will lose the traffic as the visitors would land on 404 (page not found) page.
Go through the URL list, one by one and determine what will happen with that page/url.
We have created a bunch of landing pages on a Joomla CMS system, such that the URL for each landing page is www.domain.com/page1.html and www.domain.com/page2.html, and so on. Of course the page1.html isn't really an HTML file it is a dynamic CMS page, just rewritten with htaccess.
The goal is to have one of our other domains, something like www.uniquedomain1.com show the content of www.domain.com/page1.html. Or, another domain like www.uniquedomain2.html show the content of www.domain.com/page2.html.
This needs to be search engine friendly so we can't use URL masking. Also we can't use HTACCESS redirects as this actually changes the URL in the browser bar. Need to keep the www.uniquedomain1.com URL in the browser bar.
Tried Apache VirtualHost options without any luck. You can park in a directory but not from a URL.
Ended up parking the domains on one folder, and then creating a PHP script to detect the domain host and then use CURL to query the correct url and deliver content. This whole thing seems ridiculously over complicated, and of course CURL isn't the best option, but it is all we could get to work.
Any thoughts on how to do this, or a better solution?
You can use HTACCESS redirect rules to do it without performing a redirect.
Change the html file names to be the domain name of the desired domain like domain.tld and do something like this in an .htaccess file
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(?:www\.)?([a-z0-9\.-]+\.[a-z]+) [NC]
RewriteRule ^$ /%1.html [L]
A quick test of this worked for two of my test (sub)domains test.domain.tld and test2.domain.tld. Both properly redirected to files with the names test.domain.tld.html and test2.domain.tld.html without modifying the URL.
You could also just use your PHP wrapper script to grab the content of each of the miscellaneous html files and output them.
If you renamed all of your HTML files (as in my previous suggested answer) to be domain.tld.html you could do it fairly easily. Something might look like:
<?php
require($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] .'.html');
I want to ask how do I redirect Search Engines to take a second look on my new, fresh, rewritten URL-s?
So, my former URL-s were structured like this :
http://www.sample.com/tutorials.php?name=something
and now they look much more cleaner and better :
http://www.sample.com/tutorials/programming/something.php
So, as I said, I want Google (and other engines) to take a look at my new links, which are much more SEO friendly and for that I will be indexed better.
I was told the 301 redirect method was the best, but I don't have a clue what is it, how it works and where to learn how to use it. So, I am asking you.
Side note : Would updating my sitemap.xml file and re-submitting it to Google Webmaster Tools help in this process?
Thanks in advance!
There are 2 kinds (in this context) redirects. When a client, be it a browser, search engine indexing bot, or whatever, requests a URI, the server can tell the client "What you are looking for exists, but it's somewhere else". In the case of a 302 or temporary redirect, it's essentially telling the client "What you are looking for exists, but it's temporarily over here at this URL". In the case of a 301 or permanent redirect, it's essentially telling the client "What you are looking for exists, but it has permanently moved over to this URL".
In the case of the later, browsers, proxy servers, and search engine indexes know that the old URL is no longer valid and to stop using it, and from now on to use the new URL that was returned by the server via a 301 redirect. In the case of a search engine like Google, it has an index of the old URL and all the data that its accumulated over the lifetime of that URL assoicated with it. When one of its bots sees a 301, it knows that the old URL, and its content, isn't gone, but it just permanently moved to another URL. All of the associated data Google has collected for the old URL gets trasnfered to the new URL. Google can probably figure most of this stuff out without a 301 redirect, but it's a sure way to make sure Google has got a right.
You can do such a redirect via mod_rewrite:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /tutorials\.php\?name=([^&\ ]+)
RewriteRule ^ /tutorials/programming/%1.php [L,R=301]
You should put this near the top of the htaccess file in your document root. The condition checks that an actual request has been made for /tutorials.php with a query string name="something". The "something" part gets grouped by the match and is accessed via the %1 backreference.
The 301 redirect is a response that the server can make which signals to the user (or search engine) that the page they are looking for has been permanently moved to a specified other page. It is possible to configure apache to give a 301 for certain urls, but it is probably easier to have the whatever server-side language you are using take the request, and then issue a 301.
The chances are that Google will work out what is going on fairly quickly without 301s or anything else, but submitting a sitemap to them or using the URL Parameters functionality in Google's Webmaster Tools might help.
I want to show a page instead of another page, without change the second page url.
I know this is possible with htaccess.
I copied that code from a cms htaccess:
RewriteRule ^event-([0-9]+)\.html$ calendar.php?action=event&eid=$1 [L,QSA]
with that code, we will redirect to calendar.php?......... but I want it redirect (without changing the address in address bar) to another site, for example to http://www.google.com/page......
Is it possible?
Thanks ..
If you want to provide content from another site without changing the address in the address bar of the browser that mean you becomes a proxy.
So check apache documention for proxy configuration (this can be done for specific urls only). Even mod_rewrite can do the proxy things with the [P] tag, mod_rewrite will allow a lot more 'specific url' filtering.
Now the job of a proxy, when he have the response from the distant website and he needs to render it for the HTTP client, is only to change the HTTP headers in the response. So only url in Location tags or such specific headers will be altered. You must known that all the HTML content from the distant website will not be altered (the inner links will be on www.google.com and not on your www.whythehelldoiproxygooglewithmysite.com).
If you want to alter this returned content check mod_proxy_html module, this will add some extra stuff before sending the resonse, to do some more reverse proxy alterations.