another ht access query...

[pagetta]

Our main product page is www.mysite.com/solutions/my-main-product.html, and as our company has grown we have now added more pages on these products these pages all sit in a folder called www.mysite.com/my-main-product/modulename.html, but the main page resides at its origianl URL in 'solutions' as it has all the links, rankings etc.

Now we are putting out a print advert and want to set up a simple url for our main product:
www.mysite.com/my-main-product
so essentially an index page within www.mysite.com/my-main-product/ So i made the index.html page and then put a 301 redirect in the htaccess that read

redirect 301 /my-main-product/ http://www.mysite.com/solutions/my-main-product.html

this works fine - only problem is that there are images within the 'my-main-product' folder that are used throughout the site and these links break when that line above is in the htaccess file as the img url link becomes "http://www.mysite.com/my-main-product.html/imagename.gif"

the redirect is adding the extension to the image url.

is there a way to implement the redirect using htaccess and not have to move all these images

OR

can i use a javascript redirect, and then block that page from the SEs since it is only for those coming from print media anyhow so the SEs need never ever see www.mysite.com/my-main-product/index.html. would using this JS redirect have any adverse effect on any other pages in my site, espexially the one it is redirecting to, if the SEs never see it?

hope i have explained this issue coherently and thanks for any advice offered.

[mikesmith76]

Not sure if you have mod_rewrite installed but if you do give this a shot

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^my-main-product/$ http://www.mysite.com/solutions/my-main-product.html [R=301,L]

This should be placed in the .htaccess file in the root of your site, and should redirect requests for http://www.mysite.com/my-main-product/ only.

Mike

[RegDCP]

If you are redirecting, why make the person reading the ad type in the extra folder information? Why not just make it URL.com and be done with it?

Instead of using a redirect why not incorporate an index page for this directory?

IMO this is the perfect place for a targeted landing page.

Do a source code copy of your main page, change the main content to suit, (I include a copy of the print ad as a bit of a visual confirmation for the visitor), and save it as the index page.

Reg

[DrTandem1]

Two solutions.

1) duplicate the images in another image directory that resides in the new directory.

For instances, if your images are currently found in yoursite.com/images you need to duplicate the that images directory and its contents in the new directory as follows:

yoursite.com/new-directory/images

2) Simply source the images on the page(s) that reside in the new directory to the root directory.

So, while your images on the regular pages may be sorced as:

images/theimage.gif

The images in the new directory would be sourced as so:

../images/theimage.gif


The advantage to the second method is that you save on file space. The disadvantage to the second method is that you have to change the sourcing in the code of every image on every page. This can be accomplished with a global find and replace rather quickly.

The advantage to the first method is it requires no change in the coding and a simple one-time creation of a new image sub directory and then the FTP of the contents from the original.

[pagetta]

Mike smith thanks for that code it works a treat but i have FD search installed and when i put this code into htaccess it stops the FD search from working will look into that.

Reg that's not a bad idea but we have multipl print ads for different modules of the product so would need either multiple trageted landingpages or can just send them to the mian product page as we would prefer to do.

thanks for the advice if anyone knows anything about Fluid dYNAMICS SEARCH WOULD BE HUGe help!

[mikesmith76]

When you say it stops working, does it display any errors at all?

Also do you have anything else in your .htaccess file?

[pagetta]

it says i don't have permission to access the server.

the only other things in my htaccess are 301 redirects

[mikesmith76]

I can't understand why a simple rewrite would prevent access to the server, or cause a forbidden error message.

Unfortunately I don't have much experience with the search engine you are using, but I presume you can block certain directories from being indexed? try blocking the redireted directory (/my-main-product/) and see if that changes anything.