Htaccess: Create server side redirects

Create server side redirects

Server side redirects are very useful for three main purposes:
1. Moving a site to a new domain
2. Protecting affiliate links
3. Keeping links to external resources up to date

1. When you move a site to a new domain, you should create permanent redirects (301 redirects) from the webpages of your old domain to the new domain, not only to redirect your visitors to the new domain but also to tell the search engines that your site has moved permanently. This way you won´t lose your rankings and also pass on your old website´s PageRank to the new site.

In the .htaccess file of the old domain you would put the following line to redirect all traffic from the old pages to the according new pages on your new domain.

Redirect 301 / http://www.yournewdomain.com

2. When you promote an affiliate program, especially inside an email message, your affiliate links not only look ugly in most of the cases but also leave you vulnerable to commission theft, especially ClickBank affiliate links. It´s just too easy to recognize an affiliate link as such and in case of the ClickBank links, users can simply replace your nickname with theirs and steal your commission.

To prevent this from happening and to make your affiliate links look better, you can create either temporary redirects (302 redirects) or permanent redirects (301 redirects) in your .htaccess file - for example:

Instead of my affiliate link for the Google Cash e-book:
http://hop.clickbank.net/?stiehle/googlecash

I would want to create a redirect link like
http://www.easywebtutorials.com/googlecash or
http://www.easywebtutorials.com/likes/googlecash

To create these redirects, I need to add the following lines to my .htaccess file:

Redirect temp /googlecash http://hop.clickbank.net/?stiehle/googlecash
Redirect temp /likes/googlecash http://hop.clickbank.net/?stiehle/googlecash

You can also use 302 instead of temp

Redirect 302 /googlecash http://hop.clickbank.net/?stiehle/googlecash
Redirect 302 /likes/googlecash http://hop.clickbank.net/?stiehle/googlecash

To create the permanent redirects instead of the temporary ones, simply replace temp with permanent and replace 302 with 301. For more info and links to discussions about the pros and cons of temporary and permanent redirects, read this post at the webmasterworld.com forum.

3. I also recommend that you create temporary redirects to resources on the web everywhere you place these links in places where you have no access in the future (f.ex. ebooks, reports, infoproducts). This way you are still in control over the target URL and you can modify the target URL in case the URL of the resource changes.

Define custom error pages

You can define your own error pages to improve the communication with your visitors in case something´s wrong with your site or if they are trying to access pages that are no longer available. Simply create a webpage for each of the error codes you like. Here are some of the most common errors:

401 - Authorization Required - occurs when users try to access password protected pages without giving the correct credentials.
403 - Forbidden - occurs when users try to access a file (web document, script, graphic, etc ...) whose file permissions do not allow the requested action (execute / read / write).
404 - Not Found - occurs when users try to access a webpage that doesn´t exist on your site.
500 - Internal Server Error.

You can name these custom error pages anything you like, but I recommend you choose file names that remind you of the function of each document (f.ex. notfound.html or 404.html for the 404 error page) and you can store them in any location on your server that has web access (either your root directory or a subdirectory). Then you can define these pages as custom error pages in your .htaccess file.

Supposing you have named your error pages 401.html, 404.html and 500.html and stored them in your website´s root directory, then you would add these lines to your .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 401 /401.html
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
ErrorDocument 500 /500.html

If you have named these pages "notfound.html", "authorization.html" and "internalerror.html" and uploaded them to a subdirectory named "errorpages", you would add this to your .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 401 /errorpages/authorization.html
ErrorDocument 404 /errorpages/notfound.html
ErrorDocument 500 /errorpages/internalerror.html

This article was taken from: easywebtutorial