[RESOLVED] best way to redirect pages?

Dustie

Hi all

Can anyone advise me the best way to do page redirects these days? Years ago I used a bit of code like this:

Is it still ok to use this or are there more up to date ways of doing it these days?

Cheers 🙂

bradgrafelman

Some problems with what you've shown above are:

It requires you to send more data than you need to. Why send an HTML document at all if what you really want to do is to redirect the user to the real document?
What you posted isn't even a valid HTML document anyway.
What if what was requested wasn't an HTML document? If you were trying to redirect an image request, for example, the browser would be expecting binary data as the response - not an HTML document (which would be tossed aside as garbage).

Instead, simply do what that HTML code is mimicking - send an HTTP header that instructs the browser to make a new request for the content at a new location. Example:

<?php
header('Location: http://google.com');

Dustie

ok, please bear in mind I've posted this in the Newbies section. Half of what you've replied with doesn't make any sense to me whatseover. If I'm trying to redirect from an HTML file, won't the PHP header code not work..?

bradgrafelman

I guess I don't understand what you're asking... if you're not using PHP, why did you post your question in the PHP section of the board?

Dustie

Fair point. What I'm trying to do is redirect from some HTML pages onto their newer PHP equivalents so that visitors from search engines don't end up with 404 errors. Will ask on another forum.

bradgrafelman

This forum has a board dedicated to ClientSide Technologies as well, it just wasn't clear what you were asking (beyond a generic "how to redirect?").

In your case, I would use neither HTML nor PHP; if your webserver is Apache, I would probably use a .htaccess file along with the mod_rewrite module to automatically redirect the requests to their new location while setting a '301 - Moved Permanently' HTTP status code (indicating that spiders/browsers/etc. should "learn" the new location and "forget" the old one being redirected).

Dustie

Ok, cheers... My host has an .htaccess file so I've had a look into this. A quick Google search for "redirect mod_rewrite" found me this page:

http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/sitemanagement/urlrewriting.html

but, when using the line of code that it suggests:

RewriteRule ^alice.htm$ bob.htm [R]

...it's giving me a 404 error when trying to access alice.htm as it's trying to access this page:

http://rebootclub.com/home/reboot/public_html/bob.htm

when it should be trying to find this:

http://rebootclub.com/bob.htm

Officially stumped here...

bradgrafelman

Can you show us the entire contents of your .htaccess file after you made the change?

Dustie

here you go...

RewriteEngine on
# -FrontPage-

IndexIgnore .htaccess */.??* *~ *# */HEADER* */README* */_vti*

<Limit GET POST>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from all
</Limit>
<Limit PUT DELETE>
order deny,allow
deny from all
</Limit>
AuthName rebootclub.com
AuthUserFile /home/reboot/public_html/_vti_pvt/service.pwd
AuthGroupFile /home/reboot/public_html/_vti_pvt/service.grp

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^rebootclub.co.uk$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.rebootclub.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "http\:\/\/rebootclub\.com" [R=301,L]

RewriteRule ^alice.htm$ bob.htm [R]

bradgrafelman

Oops, almost forgot..

When using the 'R' redirect flag, you should always supply a valid URI as the replacement ("bob.htm" isn't a valid URI - it's missing the protocol and domain).

Also note that the first parameter of RewriteRule does a regular expression match, and the "." period means "any character." Thus, "alice.htm" would match "aliceAhtm", "aliceBhtm", etc. etc. - if you want to match a literal period, you must escape it (e.g. put a backslash in front of it) in the pattern.

Dustie

ok, have changed it to this:

RewriteRule ^alice\.htm$ http://rebootclub.com/bob.htm [R]

..and it seems to work a treat now!

Just to check, is that now a legit 301 redirect? I looked that up on Google too and came up with code that looks different:

http://www.isitebuild.com/301-redirect.htm

thanks 🙂

bradgrafelman

Dustie wrote:
Just to check, is that now a legit 301 redirect?

No, since you didn't specify the 301 code that you'd like; Apache's default is 302 I believe.

Dustie wrote:
I looked that up on Google too and came up with code that looks different:

http://www.isitebuild.com/301-redirect.htm

It "looks different" because it's using an entirely different module to achieve a different goal.

Are you going to be using regular expressions to map multiple files to a new location? If not, then sure - RewriteRule is overkill and you should instead just use the 'Redirect' directive.

Dustie

bradgrafelman;10983817 wrote:
No, since you didn't specify the 301 code that you'd like; Apache's default is 302 I believe.

Well, can you tell me where to put the code?

...RewriteRule is overkill and you should instead just use the 'Rewrite' directive.

Ok, now I'm completely lost again...

bradgrafelman

Dustie;10983821 wrote:
Well, can you tell me where to put the code?

From the Apache Manual:

Any valid HTTP response status code may be specified, using the syntax [R=305], with a 302 status code being used by default if none is specified.

Dustie;10983821 wrote:
Ok, now I'm completely lost again...

I meant to say "Redirect" instead (in other words, what the page you linked to was doing).

Dustie

ok, so here's the code I've used to redirect all the pages onto their new PHP versions

redirect 301 /index.htm http://rebootclub.com/index.php
redirect 301 /facebook.htm http://rebootclub.com/facebook.php
redirect 301 /playlist.htm http://rebootclub.com/playlist.php
redirect 301 /setlists.htm http://rebootclub.com/setlists.php

..and it's working perfectly. Next step, doing some more coding on those PHP pages... 🙂