Redirect

They have: 82 posts

Joined: Jun 2002

Hello all

Perhaps this is a silly question (if so I apologise in advance), but I'm a low-level paper-shifter/part-time Web designer in UK Government and I've designed our Company's site.

Problem is like most Government Depts. trying to do anything involves much liasing with other Depts and much paper-shifting.

We have no Servers or Hosting capability ourselves so this part of the site is handled by (guess what?) another Government dept.

Many months ago I asked them to put a redirect on a number of older URLS for our site which were still being linked to by a large number of other sites.

I was reliably informed this had been done and checked the URLS and all seemed okay.

However I have just recently done a search for our site on AltaVista and the top hit is a subdirectory of the old URL with no re-direct seemingly in existence.

Question is if you put a redirect on a particular URL will it/should it always also include the subdirectories within that URL?

Cheers

He has: 1,016 posts

Joined: May 2002

Andrew, it depends how you do it. If you for example put a simple HTML file or maybe a CGI/PHP/ASP script to do the work for you, it will most likely just do the directory you put it in. However, if you're using Apache and you create a .htaccess file and in it put..

ErrorDocument 404 /index.html

..it will forward all requests that does not exist to your new site. So, if you only have index.html and a user goes to contact.html and it does not exist, the user will be shown index.html which in its turn will redirect the user to your new website.

I hope this makes sense.

The Webmistress's picture

She has: 5,586 posts

Joined: Feb 2001

Government eh! Nightmare!!

Can you find out who was supposed to have sorted it out? Otherwise it's going to be hard to determine why things aren't working now.

Julia - if life was meant to be easy Michael Angelo would have painted the floor....

They have: 82 posts

Joined: Jun 2002

Cheers Zollet and WM, much appreciated.
Regards
Andrew_Sam

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