My main Expression Web Help site had not been spidered since the 10th August. Though I added content and changed small bits on the homepage. So I decided to check what I’d not done that I thought I had done. This was twofold.
Getting Google to spider your site
I want to talk about the first part in this quest which was to do with redirecting the www of my domain to the one without as http://any-expression.com is the link I use and the link I want others to use. So to correct the dilution of my homepage link I needed to do a 301 redirection from one to the other. This domain happens to use a Unix plan with FPSE (FrontPage Server Extensions) installed. So I needed not only to redirect correctly using a 301 header but to make sure I did not break my FPSE.
First I needed to know what code I needed to redirect from one to the other. So I headed off to my favourite SEO Guru Blog to learn more about Basic 301 Permanent Redirect Here I found out I needed to add the following for my particular purposes
To Redirect www.mysite.com to mysite.com
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Now I had the code I wanted, the next bit of research was in finding out how NOT to break my FPSE. Fortunately for me Pat Geary had already checked out how to do this and her .htaccess file with FrontPage Server Extensions Tutorial outlined the directions clearly. There was more to come however.
Ernie Secrest of Sea Crest Hosting goes into detail where FPSE is concerned and explains the three OTHER .htaccess locations in the _vti_bin that also needed modifying if I was ever able to publish again. Sure enough I could not publish after adding the 301 redirect code to the main .htaccess, so I proceeded to do this. A quick check afterwards and I was able to publish once more. I then checked my site was redirecting from the www.mysite.com version to mysite.com version I preferred. Finally I did a header check
The correct version of http://any-expression.com/ returned the header code of HTTP/1.1 200 OK => which means Successfully Found. The www version returned the header code of HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently => which is exactly the result I wanted of Moved permanently.
I will continue write about other methods I employed and the resources I used in my quest to have Google spider my domain once more.
Tina Clarke. Microsoft MVP – FrontPage © Copyright 2007. All Rights Reserved
