Thanks for all of your help!

Thank you Roman. Yes, we definitely don't want the new subdomain to be crawled/indexed. In addition to using the canonical link as you mentioned, couldn't we block it with robots.txt?

We have a client who would like to move their Wordpress blog into a different server from their main site's server for security reasons. However, the blog is almost 10 years old with good traffic and rankings and we'd rather not have them change the domain.

The developer has come back with a URL "masking" rule in .htaccess that will display the contents of the blog placed in the new server under a subdomain but still show the blog's original URL.

If we block the new subdomain from indexing to avoid duplicate content - are there any SEO implications for doing this? Will Google see it as a deceptive practice and tank the blog's rankings?

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Hi,

We are still waiting for the developer to make the change. I will certainly post the answer when we know for sure!

Thanks

Thank you!! Just sent it

Hi Will,

That is correct - the developer told me that's exactly what he did. Could I send you a screenshot of the actual .htaccess file in a private message?

Thank you!

Thank you Will! Just one question, so if it's a simple redirect from one page to another, it would look like this? Or is adding [R=301,L] only for those that start with RewriteRule?

Redirect 301 /Bamboo https://www.fauxpanels.com/style-wood.php [R=301,L]

So the developer got back to me and said he had tried that but the redirect chain still occurred. Any other ideas?

So the developer got back to me and said he had tried that but the redirect chain still occurred. Any other ideas?

Thank you! Will try and let you know

Hi,

We have a client who recently switched their site to https://

The rule to force redirect non-secure URLs to https is in their .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on

if non-SSL and one of these, redirect to SSL

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.clientdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

However, they also have simple redirects below this rule that redirect one page to another, such as:

Redirect 301 /old.php https://www.clientdomain.com/new.php

This is causing redirect chains like this:

(A) http://www.clientdomain.com/old.php > (B) https://www.clientdomain.com/old.php > (C) https://www.clientdomain.com/new.php

Is there any way to rewrite the rules in .htaccess to get rid of these redirect chains? So that URL A goes directly to URL C?

Thank you!