Introduction
We as admins face
situation where we need to redirect websites to another. This may be
required as a part of an upgrade keeping the old URL but website should be
served from new URL. This document would
brief you on different ways can do the website redirection.
Redirect using
"Meta Refresh Tag" method
Create a simple html file with the below code. This will redirect the URL to http://newwebpage.com
HTML Syntax:
<META http-equiv=”refresh” content=”<time>[;URL=<new
url>"]>
<head>
...head section
stuff (Title, Description,etc.)...
<meta
http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://newwebpage.com">
</head>
Meta-tag method is
on of easiest way to achieve the redirect the web pages. But it has some
disadvantages. Crawlers used in search engines will not keep the old rank in the
new web page. Disadvantage in
"Meta Refresh Tag" method can be solved using 301 redirect.
What is 301 redirect.
301 redirect,
interpreted as “moved permanently”, is a method used to redirect webpages while
preserving your search engine rankings. There are different
ways to achieve this.
Please note my examples are based on Apache web server.
Redirect with .htaccess and Mod_Rewrite
The easiest way
to achieve redirection is using .htaccess, since it doesn’t require access to server. We can make use of FTP access and upload the .htaccess file.
Scenario 1.
Simple 301
redirect accessing a page to a newwebpage.
RewriteEngine On
Redirect 301 /mypage.htm http://newwebpage.com
Redirect 301 /mypage.htm http://newwebpage.com
Save the file and upload the .htaccess file to the root of
the domain that hosts the old page. This will do a permanent redirect the page
to the newwebpage.com and get the advantage of old web site ranking as well.
Scenario 2
www and non-www are not same for search engines
There are two ways to view
most sites, that’s the www and non-www version www.domain.com and it basically
became the standard way to access a site via a browser. However it’s not the
only way, some sites can be browsed using http://domain.com which in the non-www version.
This has led to problems with
search engines like Google indexing both versions resulting in duplicate
content and sharing link benefit problems. Some webmasters link to the www
version and others the non-www, search engine spiders follow the links and
spider the site twice.
.htaccess file to redirect non-www site to www
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule
^/(.*) http://www.domain.com:%{SERVER_PORT}/$1
[L,R]
Scenario 3
Redirect Homepage of a site according to
the ``User-Agent:'' header of the request
You might have noticed some websites will load different pages when browsed from different browsers. The simple logic is to have multiple websites and have the below in .htaccess file.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla
RewriteRule ^/$ /homepage.max.html [L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Lynx
RewriteRule ^/$ /homepage.min.html [L]
RewriteRule ^/$ /homepage.std.html [L]
Scenario
4
Protecting
your images and files from linking
If you do not want other webmasters linking to your website files and images as inline-images on their pages use the below in .htaccess file.
RewriteEngine
On
RewriteCond
%{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ [NC]
RewriteCond
%{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://domain.com [NC]
RewriteCond
%{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.domain.com [NC]
RewriteCond
%{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://201.192.1.168 [NC]
RewriteRule
^.*$ http://www.domain.com/ [R,L]
