Tuesday, December 21, 2010

301 redirects on Godaddy

Wow.  I cannot begin to tell you how much a pain this was.  Keep in mind, that I am not a super coder (yet), so things like a 301 redirect tend to baffle me.  As they should!  This is not something I recommend doing unless you either A. Know what you're doing B. Don't care what happens to the website or C. Have read enough about 301 redirects to know what you're doing.

In short, there are many fantastic articles in the world about .htaccess files, 301redirects, so on and so on.  This is not meant for every browser.  I'm not endorsed by GoDaddy in any way shape or form (did you not see that second section where I called the whole process a pain), I just don't want somebody taking down a server like I did trying to redirect a page.  It's way too stressful.  Also, I don't know how this works with other hosts, since I'm using GoDaddy, that is all this tutorial is about.

So now that I've gotten all that jabbering out of the way, I'm pleased to present you with a step by step tutorial on a 301 redirect using GoDaddy.  A 301 redirect (the technical name) is kinda like telling the internet that you are going to move your webpage and its going to like it.  For this example, I chose to make http://www.line-ily.com redirect to http://line-ily.com which allows for search engine optimization to recognize that both versions are the same type.  If you're a visual person like me, not to worry, I have several pictures.  Are you ready?  Deep breath!  Let's go.

1.  Log into your account manager.  In other words, go to Godaddy.com and click the my products tab.  You will then be shown a link that looks something like this:

As you can see, I hadn't logged in by this point.  Click any of the links and log in.

2.  Click on the web hosting area.  I've chosen to highlight this item in a light blue box (all important aspects in this tutorial will likewise be highlighted as such).

3.  Select the site on which hosting you would like to alter and click the launch button.

4.  This is the screen that will appear next.  Select the content area.



5.  Select the "Sites Redirect" option.


6. Here comes the fun part.  As you can see I've already set up my redirect.  For this process, hit New Redirect.


7.  Here is where things get a little tricky.  Not to panic though, once I figured out this method, I literally was able to redirect my site in under five minutes from the point of logging in to the point of making sure it worked.  Here is where you redirect your site.  Notice the From tab is the current selected tab, you will not be able to move to the To tab until this portion is filled out.  In this tab, you want to enter the name of your Godaddy hosted domain in the domain area simply in the format of yourdomain.com (please don't enter yourdomain.com, I might have to laugh at you).  So for my example, I entered line-ily.com , note that I did not use the http:// or www. format.  This is key.  Under the redirect options, there are the choices "With and Without" (say if I wanted to redirect line-ily.com to laurelrocks.com), only with (which is what I selected to turn www.line-ily.com to line-ily.com), and only without (if I wanted to do the reverse and make line-ily.com read only as www.line-ily.com).  As I mentioned, for this instance, I selected with www. prefix.


8.  Now you may hit the To tab.  Choose whether you would like to use a http:// or https:// prefix and then enter the domain that you want the site to which you want traffic redirected. Hit the next button and you're done!


I hope this is able to help someone out there.  I went through literally about 8 hours of trying to figure this out, followed by several hours of cleaning up messes and panicking and wondering if I had caused my site permanent damage.  If you use this, please let me know how it goes for you or if you have any questions.

No comments:

Post a Comment