Which front page link to use?

[mikemac]

Originally Posted by matt1biz

No that's not cloaking, cloaking would be if when visitors visited that page you used something like a meta refresh to automatically transfer them to another page.


Again, it's not really doing much, the only thing that will stop google from indexing as if it's prevented from doing so by .htaccess, otherwise if it knows about a page it will index and cache it.

Okay Matt I might as well get rid of the "robots" content="index,follow" and "revisit-after" content="30 days" meta tags.

How about the <META http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache"> tag seeing about 1/4 of my web site viewers are coming from bookmarks? Actually it says Direct Address/Bookmarks. Should I keep that tag?

Mike

[matt1biz]

How about the <META http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache"> tag seeing about 1/4 of my web site viewers are coming from bookmarks? Actually it says Direct Address/Bookmarks. Should I keep that tag?

That's up to you, that just stops a browser from caching the page. It helps that a user will see any changes pages, though most browsers won't cache a page between sessions. It's also worth considering speed issues, cached pages load much faster. - This won't affect the search engines at all though.

[mikemac]

Thanks Matt

I wonder if Tony missed my 2 posts to him on the previous page because it started a new page?

Mike

[TWD-Tony]

Sorry Mike - I've been very busy the last few days...

You can leave the _vti_inf and other FP files alone, they will not do any harm (if you disable FP extensions in cpanel then I think they should disappear anyway...)

As for your .htaccess file - the contents look fine, there isn't anything there to cause concern - you can just copy 'n paste the code I published earlier and add to that file to activate the redirect(s).
And as for hostgator - I don't know how "one off" my case was - but a whole server was compromised which I consider prety lame, it may have been an isolated incident and hopefully you will not have any problems with them.
Just as a side note - if you are UK based and you are targetting UK traffic with a .com domain then you don't want to be with hostgator - they are USA based and have USA servers (Google will not rank you well, or even at all for UK only searches).

[mikemac]

Thanks again Tony

No I'm in Canada and my target market is in the US and most other countries. I will definately keep that in mind in the future though. If I start to market products or services that are just available to Canadians then I will get Canadian web hosting.

That was easy. So now I've got mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/index.html redirected to www.mydomain.com

As you are probably aware Tony, Host Gator offers muliple domain names. So I will probably have to add a similar .htaccess file for each addon domain, wouldn't I?

Or if I just use www.myaddondomain.com all the time from the start would I even need the .htaccess 301 redirect file for my other domains?

Mike

[mikemac]

Hi Tony

I could not use the 301 redirect code that you gave me to add to my .htaccess file.

When I did it also redirected my 2 addon domains that I have on my server to www.my1stdomain.com/my1staddondomain/ and www.my1stdomain.com/my2ndaddondomain/ It also prevented me from logging into the forum that I am working on.

So I made the 301 redirect code for each addon domain with notepad and uploaded them to the folder for each addon domain to see what that would do. But it still redirected my 2 addon domains the same as above.

Maybe I did something wrong? When I did this they showed in my addon domain folders as .htaccess.txt not just .htaccess

Is there any other way of redirecting mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/index.html to www.mydomain.com when I have addon domains other than buying a seperate hosting package for each domain?

Thanks
Mike

[mikemac]

Questions from my last post that haven't been answered yet.

Maybe I did something wrong? When I did this they showed in my addon domain folders as .htaccess.txt not just .htaccess

Is there any other way of redirecting mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/index.html to www.mydomain.com when I have addon domains other than buying a seperate hosting package for each domain?

Thanks
Mike

[CanzDesign]

This is just an observation, after reading this post

I decided to check the PR of the domain name domain.com that so often get's used as an example in a question like this.

The PR is 7 and has something link 5,860 backlinks according to google. The same goes for mydomain.com What's the bet most backlinks are from forums, with people asking these sorts of questions

Clever people that brought those domain names huh... free backlinks worldwide....

[mikemac]

I know what you mean Lynny. The only reason that I'm using it is because I didn't think it would be allowed in this forum if I posted my own domain names. Someone sure is getting a lot of back links because of it though.

I hope these last 2 post don't side track me from getting an answer to my questions 3 posts up.

Mike

[fisicx]

Imagine I was a search engine robot. I find your domain and begin indexing and come across a link to your subdomain. I go there and find an empty site. Your re-direct is hidden in your server settings so as far as I am concerned the sub-domain has no idexable material.

You could have a direct link to the sub-directory from your homepage but this will count as an internal link and not help your ranking.

If you want you sub-domains to rank well you need to buy some webspace and move the content overthere.

As to the redirect, what is it that isn't working? If I search for domain.com, www.domain.com or www.domain.com/index.html will I end up in the same place?

And the file is called .htaccess not .htaccess.txt - remove the extension and try again.