For SEO purposes. How do I force user gets redirected to mysite.com/index when types mysite.com on browser ?
I've tried Redirect / en/index
But I'm getting "Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request to this address in a way that will never end."
Also, can this redirection consired set language (php psession, cookies?)
p.s. xampp/windows
Redirect works on path prefixes. Redirect / … matches any path its prefix is / (so virtually any path). Use RedirectMatch instead:
RedirectMatch ^/$ /en/index
I believe the error you're getting from Firefox is because you're entering an infinite loop with this redirection. If you try to redirect to a page that doesn't exist, and your server is set up to redirect to a page that doesn't exist on 404, you'll enter a loop. So, ensure that your redirect is going somewhere significant. Does /index exist? Try redirecting to Google instead and see if you get the same error.
(My server knowledge is limited to goofing around while working on school projects, so take anything I say with a grain of salt)
This probably means you have an error in your redirect code. What Firefox is detecting is that the page are trying to view is redirecting you to itself. Without this protection it would just seem like the page wasn't loading.
If you are running windows on your workstation, I would recommend downloading Fiddler2. It will let you see the series of redirects that your server is sending.
Related
I inherited a domain that previously had a 301 redirect from the root ("/") to "/index.shtml"
I've removed the redirect and a different site on the domain, but people who visited the site in the past will have the redirect behavior cached in their browsers... for a terribly long time, unless they manually clear their caches.
Anyone trying to go to example.com in these browsers will be sent to example.com/index.shtml before they even make any HTTP requests. Right now this is a huge problem because there is no index.shtml, but is there something I can do with headers to tell browsers to "forget about that redirect you just did!"?
The short answer: There is no way to tell the browsers of the users to "forget" the R 301 redirect. 301 means permanent, it can be only undone on action of the user or when the cache expires.
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10.3.2
Similar Q and A on Stackoverflow:
Apache - how to disable browser caching while debugging htaccess,
Cannot remove 301 redirect
Try to avoid 301 redirects and use 302 (temporarily) instead. Here is an article how to set no cache for 301 redirects (didn't try it):
https://github.com/markkolich/blog/blob/master/content/entries/set-cache-control-and-expires-headers-on-a-redirect-with-mod-rewrite.md
What you could do in your scenario: You could add a header redirect to the file index.shtml, which sends the user to the original file, where he should usually go.
This can be done by a clear data-only cache.
It can remove all,.htaccess redirects changes from the browser.
I have added 301 redirect on my website by mistake (because I was doing maintenance). Now lots of people can't get back to my website, because they are still redirected to other page - eventhough I removed redirection (even deleted htaccess). As much as I searched around it's because htaccess (or 301 redirect) is cached in users browser and I wasn't able to find any solution for this. Is there any way to fix this, I can't just loose hundreds of visitors because of something like this?
This page explains what is going on in good detail:
301 Redirects: The Horror That Cannot Be Uncached
Basically, modern browsers cache the redirect response for 301 for some indeterminate amount of time and will not make an updated request to your old web page to refresh it. Users can manually clear the cache and, because it is a cache, data can be purged if the browser needs more space for other data (like other redirects).
This SuperUser question resolves the caching issue from the client's end:
How can I make Chrome stop caching redirects?
One interesting answer is:
//superuser.com/a/660522/178910
In this answer, the user points out that the browser treats http://example.com/ and http://example.com/? as two different URLs. You could go to the "new" site and setup an HTTP 302 redirect pointing back to the original page with a ? on the end and it should load. If they original page already had a query as part of the URL, you can simple add an & to the end to achieve the same result.
It's not perfect -- it is a different URL after all -- but at least they'll be able to view your old site.
Note that your web application may try to redirect empty queries or invalid queries back to a "clean" page, which you may have to disable to get the intended result.
UPDATE
One other option is to put a redirect from the new site back to the old site (make this a 302 or 307 redirect to avoid the 301 problem you're currently having). From my testing, Chrome will remove the old redirect when it does this. It may throw a "redirect loop" error, but only once. I was unable to reproduce the cached redirect problem at all with the latest version of Firefox. Other browsers' behavior is probably going to be inconsistent.
I'd like to understand the difference between redirecting and rewriting a URL using .htaccess.
So here's an example: Say I have a link like www.abc.com/ index.php?page=product_types&cat=88 (call this the "original" url)
But when the user types in abc.com/shoes (let's call this the "desired" url), they need to see the contents of the above link. To accomplish this, I would do this:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.*)shoes(.*)$ index.php?page=product_types&cat=88
Nothing wrong with this code and it does the trick. However, if I type in the original url in the address bar, the content comes up, but the url does not change. So it remains as www.abc.com/index.php?page=product_types&cat=88
But what if I wanted the desired url (/shoes) to show up in the address bar if I typed in www.abc.com/ index.php?page=product_types&cat=88? How would this be accomplished using .htaccess? Am I running into a potential loop?
Some of the explanation can be found here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11711948/851273
The gist is that a rewrite happens solely on the server, the client (browser) is blind to it. The browser sends a request and gets content, it is none the wiser to what happened on the server in order to serve the request.
A redirect is a server response to a request, that tells the client (browser) to submit a new request. The browser asks for a url, this url is what's in the location bar, the server gets that request and responds with a redirect, the browser gets the response and loads the URL in the server's response. The URL in the location bar is now the new URL and the browser sends a request for the new URL.
Simply rewriting internally on the server does absolutely nothing to URLs in the wild. If google or reddit or whatever site has a link to www.abc.com/index.php?page=product_types&cat=88, your internal server rewrite rule does absolutely nothing to that, nor to anyone who clicks on that link, or any client that happens to request that URL for any reason whatsoever. All the rewrite rule does is internally change something that contains shoes to /index.php?page=product_types&cat=88 within the server.
If you want make it so a request is made for the index.php page with all of the query strings, you can tell the client (browser) to redirect to the nicer looking URL. You need to be careful because rewrite rules loop and your redirect will be internally rewritten which will cause a redirect which will be internally rewritten, etc.. causing a loop and will throw a 500 Server Error. So you can match specifically to the request itself:
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\?page=product_types&cat=88
RewriteRule ^/?index.php$ /shoes [L,R=301]
This should only be used to make it so links in the wild get pointed to the right place. You must ensure that your content is generating the correct links. That means everything on your site is using the /shoes link instead of the /index.php?page=product_types&cat=88 link.
I am using Magento 1.6.2.0 on a shared host running Litespeed web server, and I have begun investigating ways to speed up page loads. Currently I am using Pingdom to look at requests and it appears that I am losing an entire second from the get-go when I type my URL without the www. The browser redirects to the www page, it's just that it takes so long. Is this something I can fix? I presume that I can change Magento's base-url to not include the www, but then I presume I'll have the same delay when going to the www url instead.
I took a look at the link you gave, and I indeed see an about 1 second delay before I receive a 302 redirect to the URL with www. prepended. Not entirely coincidentally, the actual page HTML also takes quite long (about 1.7 seconds) to load.
This is a fairly common issue with large web applications: to return even a simple response like a redirect, the entire application must load and run its startup code. Couple this with a not so fast shared webserver that isn't optimized for that one application, and you can get quite slow page load times. It's nothing unique to Magento; I've seen the same effect with MediaWiki myself, and I expect that it happens with other applications too.
The obvious solution is just to avoid redirects: as long as you make sure all your URLs have the right hostname, the extra delay due to wrong hostnames will not appear. Magento itself will presumably take care of this for its own URLs, but if you have any other code (or static pages) that link to your Magento URLs, make sure they use the right hostname.
You can also sign up for Google Webmaster Tools (and similar tools for other search engines) and configure your preferred domain there (it's under Site configuration → Settings) so that Google will automatically prepend www. to any links to your site it indexes.
You can (and should) also try to reduce Magento's startup time in general. This will speed up not only redirects, but all other page loads as well. I'm not familiar enough with Magento to be able to give much detailed advice on this, but the obvious first step for any massive PHP application is to make sure you're using a PHP accelerator such as APC.
Finally, the fastest way to redirect visitors to the correct hostname is to make your webserver send the redirect directly without ever invoking Magento at all. The details on how to do this depend on the server software you're using, but apparently LiteSpeed supports the same RewriteRule syntax as Apache's mod_rewrite, so you should be able to do this just by adding the following lines to your main .htaccess file:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.mmmspeciosa\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mmmspeciosa.com/$1 [R=301,L]
(By the way, I'm using HTTP 301 permanent redirects here instead of the HTTP 302 temporary redirects Magento seems to be using. This is not only more appropriate according to the HTTP standard, but also works better with search engines, which treat a 301 redirect as an indication to index the target URL instead of the source of the redirect. If this redirect type is not configurable in Magento, I would consider it a bug. If it is configurable, you should set it to 301.)
I haven't found a solution to this, since all of my searching and research points to query string related issues when you're going from a file with a query string, over to another URL. In my case, I'm just looking to go from a regular folder/file, etc., to a URL with a query string.
I have a working .conf file which contains various rules for my site. I'd like to add in another one that looks like this:
RedirectMatch ^/webinar$ https://company.webex.com/company/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=123456
RedirectMatch ^/webinar/$ https://company.webex.com/company/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=123456
I've modified the URL to be more generic. This redirects properly when I type in www.company.com/webinar however, it's not going to the above URL. When I type in the above URL directly in a browser, it loads up fine.
The redirect is taking me to a generic Webex page. This could be an issue with the redirect, but I think it has to do with how RedirectMatch is handling the query string on this URL. I'm at a loss.
EDIT
There might be an issue in how I now have 3 redirects happening. The first is the /webinar, second is the above URL, and the third is that the above URL redirects to another page where quite frankly, webex may be handling iframes. Not 100% sure. So could the second redirect be borking the third, etc? I can provide more specifics as far as the webex URL's if required.
SOLUTION
The issue here is that Webex can't handle a double redirect which is what's happening. Instead, I had to leverage a PHP page with a header redirect in a separate folder off of the TLD. The above RedirectMatch syntax is correct, but for some reason, Webex borks it.