301 Re-Direct

A website test site for SEO gave me this error....

Permanent Redirect Not Found

Search engines often regard www.estetica-design-forum.com and estetica-design-forum.com as two different websites unless you take specific measures to signal to them that they are the same site.

The best way to handle this situation is to setup what is known as a permanent redirect (or a "301" redirect) from one of these sites to the other. This way, any links that are pointing to the secondary site benefit the primary site, from an SEO perspective.

We could not detect a permanent redirect for this site, so it may be experiencing the negative effects of link fragmentation (some of the inbound links may point to www.estetica-design-forum.com and others to estetica-design-forum.com) For example, www.estetica-design-forum.com seems to have 11,877 inbound links whereas graphic-design-forum.com has 11,959 inbound links. By correctly configuring a permanent 301 redirect, the search rankings might improve as all inbound links are correctly counted for the website.

Sorry to sound a little naive but hosting and domain etc is my real weak point.

Can you use VBSEO to fix this? Is it a major problem would fixing it benefit me a great deal?

Thanks for the input

Hello Andi ,

Please uncomment the following lines in vbseo .htaccess with changing yourdomain.com to match your domain.

Code:

#RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com
#RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/forums/$1 [L,R=301]

Thanks for the help but you'll have to be a little clearer I'm not a coder, can this be done via the VBSEO Cpanel?

You need to edit your .htaccess which you uploaded to your server with vBSEO installation.These lines are inside the .htaccess you need to uncomment them by removing # from the beginning of the lines. After the edit the lines shall look like

Code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.graphic-design-forum\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.graphic-design-forum.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Thanks again

I now have a small problem, I'm trying to add a new domain onto my hosting account and the re-direct .htaccess file is redirecting my new parked url to the other one is there a way around it?

Originally Posted by toon

I now have a small problem, I'm trying to add a new domain onto my hosting account and the re-direct .htaccess file is redirecting my new parked url to the other one is there a way around it?

That's exactly what you want to happen. You don't want multiple domains pointing to the same content; it will only hurt your rankings. All parked domains will be 301 redirected to the primary domain.

Or, if you're trying to add a whole new site to your hosting account, point the domain to a new, empty directory, not to your current site.

Thanks for the reply. That's the problem the host seems to set up add on hosts just by adding a new folder and pointing the new domain at it. So VBSEO is doing it's job which means I can't add on a site without starting a new account. Just thought I'd ask if there was a way around it.

If they added a new directory under your current site directory, you can put a .htaccess file into that directory and put this line in it:

RewriteEngine Off