301 redirect

[kellymandingo]

Guys

Another post by me in regard to a 301 redirect which follows on from this post here

http://www.seomoz.org/q/seomoz-crawl-test

To quickly summarise all i have done is change URL name and done a simple 301 to change name where respective urls form old go to the relevant new pages

Ok Now 14 weeks since we implemented our 301, Originally done In PHP everything looked text book but still 80% down on rankings PR has returned to inner pages Home page has not updated

After some advice from some of the members here i changed the 301 on the old domain name from PHP to Htaccess

This is the code i used on the old server is below

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newsite.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

On the new site the canonical is fixed by PHP , i want to change this to Htaccess, capturing the canonical element along with removing the trailing slash (This is only what has been done in the past so just keeping consistant)

This is the situation

Old site sits on a different server from the new so each have their own individual I.P addresses

I am convinced somewhere in the PHP application we are chaining so want Htaccess on old server to do the 301 and want htaccess on new server to deal with canonical elements and remove trailing slash (if that best practice)

What would be the best way to do this where we wont be chaining 301's

at present all looks perfect and doing what it should, but i know there is an issue and i believe it to be with the php script

Thanks for taking the time to look

Paul

Ps where i had the issue on the old site where Crawl test said page don't exist i now have on the new site if i try and crawl the non www. version of the new site , tested on a site that has the htaccess 301 in place and get the option of crawling the old or the new page so something don't stack up so its not the tool its the PHP

Fetch as Googlebot and every other tool reports the correct header responses

[StreamlineMetrics]

Hi Paul,

I've read this post and your initial post and I'm trying to figure out exactly what you are still having problems with. Is the issue that your rankings/traffic tanked after you implemented the 301 redirects from the non-www version of the site to the www version 3 months ago and you haven't seen any improvement since? Or are you just having issues with the SEOmoz site crawler? It really shouldn't matter if you use PHP or .htaccess for handling redirects since they are both on the server side, so there might be something else causing problems. I wouldn't worry about PR since it's natural for it to take awhile to move over to the new version of the page and plus PR by itself is not all that important anyways.

I'm willing to investigate further if you can provide some more details.

• Patrick

[kellymandingo]

Hi Patrick

Thanks for responding

I still have no rankings 80% down, its 14 weeks since i implemented the 301 and some of the inner pages are ranking (Therese are a lot lower than when we did the 301) however the home page even if i copy a line of text wont bring up my site.

The original 301 went textbook style and everything looked perfect, but rankings did not follow and all we did was a straightforward name change

My developer insisted on doing this in PHP however most his functions and he states when i asked him for the code "The 301 on the new site is integrated into the application and has dependences on other functions, which in turn will have dependences on other functions, which would basically mean handing over a substantial amount of code. Potentially most of the application"

So basically on the outside i am 100% convinced that the 301 is chaining somewhere causing me a problem, so i am going to change both old and new sites for htaccess

I currently have this single line on the old site

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

Originally tried the below but got an internal 500 error (ps any reason why that would give me a internal server error) as below would have been my preferred code

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$
RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I think really what i need is the answer to is what do i put on the old site which is on server 1 is it just a single line 301

and on the new site which is dealing with the canonicals and removal of trailing slash

The original issue came when i changed URL name, and it was only the crawler that brought to light that i could not crawl the non www. version of my site (even though it is the www. version i wanted to crawl because the crawler should have gave a message that the site is 301 to the ww,

. version but it said page unavailable, however doing it on a colleagues site which had been correctly 301'd gave a message that the site had moved do you want to crawl the current or the new page ... so the crawl test will pick up on a 301 if implemented correctly

Hope that made sense