Landing on the forum page?

[Stephanie]

Not sure whether this is the best place, but I have a problem that is probably quite simple to resolve, so here goes:

This is what I want to do.

I have a high bounce percentage from the vbadvanced Portal and want to bypass the root domain to go straight in the forums - where people who do land there seem to hang around longer.

Thus what I want is that when a user selects www.bizface.co.uk they are redirected to www.bizface.co.uk/bizfaceforum/ always

By this means all accesses to the site 'touch down' on the forum pages thus avoiding PR leakage amongst other things.

a simple redirect permenant in .htacess does not work as this loops

Will a re-write command approach work - and do you have any tips?

kind regards

Stephanie​

 

[temi]

I wonder why .httaccess loops, could this be something to do with vB Advanced set up? For SEO reasons I think you should find out why .httaccess loops and fix it then use 301 redirect which is the redirect to make the changes you require. You may find this link on 301 redirects useful: 301 Redirect - How to create Redirects

 

[Stephanie]

301 redirect

Thanks Temi, will have a read and give it a try.

Will let you know if it works/not!

kind regards

Stephanie

 

[smeagain]

I fully agree withTemi, investigate why the .httaccess loops and fix it so you get a 301.

 

[espmartin]

Said already by these great folks, and I agree - Apache 301 is the best solution, and
shouldn't be looping at all.

 

[Stephanie]

Hi all, thanks for this.
We think we have found the problem why it keeps looping on a 301 on vbadvanced - I will post it up once we have checked it out just in case anyone else has the same issue.

 

[temi]

This is brilliant Stephanie, now you can use the correct redirect.

 

[Stephanie]

and here is the reason why we had a problem!
When carrying out the test of the redirects I forgot that the index.php for vba was in the root where it was set up initially. This caused the loops in the redirect.

I renamed the index.php back to cmps_index.php then moved it (having checked the forum path) to the forum root.

htaccess file created then moved to domain root

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^$ http://www.bizface.co.uk/bizfaceforum/ [L,R=301]

into vbadvanced => default settings => main options

set url to cmps file as

http://www.bizface.co.uk/bizfaceforum/cmps_index.php

Now all working as required on the - job done

Just a small slip caused the problem

So just in case anyone else struggles, hope this helps.

kind regards
Stephanie

 

[temi]

Thanks for sharing this with us Stephanie, rep added