1and1 web forwarding

[Steven Barkess]

Hi

I've asked 1and1 direct but have not got a reply... great hoster but rubbish customer service.

I started with the .co.uk name and then bought the .com. I set the .com as the main and used web forwarding from the .co.uk.

I was subsequently told that I was not getting .com indexed due to the forwarding using frames.

I have stopped the forward, has any one got thoughts / advice on this?

Thanks

Steven

[Duncan Rounding]

I don't think this is really an ISP issue - not that O like 1and1's customer service.

Fames of course complicates matters a lot and you can search around the internet for many ways to assist the robot to at least find some of the pages in your framed site - such as putting a sitemap in the <noframe> tags etc. Ideally of course don't use frames.

I have a number of domains registered with both .com & .co.uk (incidentally hosted by 1and1). I recently changed my primary from .com to .co.uk. I searched the net and found some code to put into the .htaccess file for the .com domain:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?mydomain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mydomain.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

You can look up the meaning of the code but I undersatand it essentialy tells the search engines that the new domain (.co.uk) is a permanent new home for the .com domain. This appears be working, within about 2 weeks we already have the .co.uk domains listing in Google, whereas before they were never listed at all.

The .htaccess file on the .co.uk domain has the following:

Redirect permanent mydomain.com http://www.mydomain.co.uk/
ErrorDocument 400 http://www.mydomain.co.uk/error400.htm
etc.

Maybe this will be of some help.

Duncan

[Duncan Allan]

This is an old thread !!! but I get them same problems with forwarding even now and I await a reply from 1and1.

Duncan

[Mark H]

General comment - bear in mind that 1&1's servers are in Germany and in my experience a .com hosted with them will not show in Google UK, but a .co.uk will. Customer service - don't email - phone them - service is pretty good.

[Duncan Allan]

Thank you Mark I didn't know that they're in Germany. So what's in Slough, the dedicated servers?

I'll take this up with them when I get my last email response.

TIA Duncan

[Steven Barkess]

I am not really sure what is going on any more!!

My .co.uk is not forwarded to any thing, all my Actinic settings are based on .com, however I notice when I have changed a file (ie for homepage) and upload from Actinic it also updates the .co.uk page.

[Duncan Rounding]

Some questions rather than answers...

How have you set up your domains and directories in your hosted webspace?
Have you got a seperate directory for .co.uk and .com domains?
How did you do your forwarding?

Log on with a seperate FTP program and see where things are loacted that Actinic uploaded. Also check in the 1and1 control panel to see what directories and domains you have set up. You can then make sure that Actinic is loading where you think it is from an FTP point of view.

Duncan

[wjcampbe]

In a standard 1and1 setup, all the domains will point to the root of the site and typing any domain into a browser will return the same index page. Once you navigate off the index page though, the results will follow the navigation setup - i.e. relative addressing will continue to show the domain you entered by, but follow one link hard coded to .com from the co.uk and all future pages viewed will return the .com domain path - you can confirm this by watching the file path change in the browser address bar.

As Duncan suggests, the 1and1 control panel allows you to specify a destination folder for each domain, so you can achieve separation. This can be seen on my setup by following the www.egyptianwonders.net link and comparing this to www.egyptianwonders.co.uk

I have as an experiment, directed the .net to a different folder with a two page intro/redirect invitation, but I never promote the .net

I believe the best action is the one proposed in post #2, also from Duncan, but the first option requires access to the apache mod_rewrite function which is not always available. The second redirect method is always available available. I handle only the 404 errors with a custom document, where Duncan catches the 400 errors - I think it is more common to catch the 404 - file not found, and leave the 401 - needs password, 403 - forbidden and the other less common 400 errors to the standard messaging.

[Duncan Allan]

My reply from 1and1 reads...

"Please note that it is only possible to redirect a domain name to another domain
name and a folder. You will not be able to redirect your domain to an individual
file on another web server. A trailing "/" will always be added."

Therefore I can redirect http://www.giftsline.co.uk to http://www.giftsline.com

and not http://www.giftsline.com/acatalog/index.html

Duncan

[wjcampbe]

Duncan,

While this is true, the practical effects are the same - if you direct the co.uk to the com/ your browser will automatically look for index.htm or index.html or default.htm or default.html and deliver the first one it finds.

As long as your home page is called index.html and is in the root of the domain being pointed to, it will be the document delivered - unless you also have an index.htm and/or a page named default.htm(l).

rgds

[Duncan Rounding]

I 'm not a fundi with this stuff but assuming you have separation as Bill described then - although I haven't had chance to check - I would've expected this to work:

Redirect permanent mydomain.co.uk http://www.mydomain.com/acatalog/

Have you tried this line in your .htaccess file in the .co.uk domain root?

Duncan R

[Steven Barkess]

Ok, understand now about all the domains will point to the root of the site. Does a search engine ie google penalise for this.

I notice that if I put in the .co.uk I have a rank of 3, but put in the .com (the main one, set up after the .co.uk) it has a rank of n/a. I assume this is just a timing issue rahter than google thinking it is a copy of the .co.uk.

Steven

[wjcampbe]

The redirect will tell the search engines that the com is your main site where you want all the traffic to go and that it permanently replaces the co.uk. Without the redirect, the search engine would probably consider the content to be duplication, and with the com being the newer, would probably (but not definitely) just ignore it.

Over time, all the references to the co.uk will disappear from the search engines and be replaced with the com pages.