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Saved by 8 people (-2 private), first by anonymouse user on 2006-09-15

Kenyth on 2008-03-01 - Tags 20080108 , redirect , subdomain , wordpress
Cogdog on 2007-12-12 - Tags howto , programming , software , web , network
Joel on 2007-03-28 - Tags apache , seo , subdomain
Jonphipps on 2006-12-08 - Tags 5_stars , apache , cookbook , semantic_web , server , useful_tool
Percept on 2006-09-15 - Tags clean , mod-rewrite , mod_rewrite , photo-matt , photomatt , request , subdomain , subdomains , url

Public Comment

on 2006-09-15 by percept

How to redirect a request for subdomain.domain.ext to domain.ext/getinfo.php?about=subdomain without changing the url (see comments 20+21)

Public Sticky notes

What follows is what I consider to be best practice for my personal sites and a guide for those who wish to do the same. Months ago I dropped the www. prefix from my domain in part because I think it’s redundant and also because I wanted to experiment with how Google treated valid HTTP redirect codes. The experiment has been a great success. Google seems to fully respect 301 Permanent Redirects and the change has taken my previously split PageRank has been combined and now I am at 7. There are other factors that have contributed to this, of course, and people still continue to link to my site and posts with a www. (or worse) in front of it, but overall it just feels so much cleaner to have one URI for one resource, all the time. I’m sure that’s the wrong way to say that, but the feeling is there nonetheless.

Now for the meat. What’s a good way to do this? Let’s look at our goals:

No links should break.
Visitors should be redirected using a permanent redirect, HTTP code 301, meaning that the address bar should update and intelligent user agents may change a stored URI
It should be transparent to the user.
It should also work for mistyped “sub domains” such as ww. or wwww.

Highlighted by jonphipps

The experiment has been a great success. Google seems to fully respect 301 Permanent Redirects and the change has taken my previously split PageRank has been combined and now I am at 7. There are other factors that have contributed to this, of course, and people still continue to link to my site and posts with a www. (or worse) in front of it, but overall it just feels so much cleaner to have one URI for one resource, all the time.

Highlighted by joel

Photo Matt » Wildcard DNS and Sub Domains