Does .htaccess redirect affect search engine rankings?

  • Hi there, I have a wordpress site example.co.uk. I also have add-on domains (about 5 others with other country endings example.fr, example.es, etc.) pointing to directories, on the same root directory, that are redirected to pages example.co.uk/french-page, example.co.uk/spanish-page, etc. using .htaccess rewrite rules:

    RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.fr$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.fr$
RewriteRule (.*)$ https://mysite.co.uk/french-page/ [R=301,L]

    I have a few questions:

    1). I wish to know if this will affect my search engine indexing i.e. duplicate content?

    2). I also want to know if it is possible to keep the example.fr url in the browser once the user has been redirected to the example.co.uk/french-page page? I have tried a few different .htaccess rewrites with no success so far.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • Hi,

    You complicate your life and user experience for browsing your sites, anyway if you would like to do this I suggest you, that set up canonical url example.fr in page example.co.uk/french-page (this will avoid duplicate content, as content on example.co.uk/french-page will point-boost ranking of example.fr).

    Another step is to set up redirection – it exist something called masking redirection where example.fr will be redirected to example.co.uk but domain example.fr will show in browser. So you just tell domain where “content is’ but visitors will see example.fr even if your files are under domain example.co.uk

    Redirection can vary on hosting/server setting so probably your host docs or support can help you with this little bit.

    Thread Starter G-Olly

    (@g-olly)

    Hi Peter, thanks for getting back to me, I should explain why I am using this method. I have a paid for theme that I have made quite a number of customizations of. The example.co.uk site has a premium translator plugin that serves cached pages for the different languages that cannot be indexed by search engines. To try and boost organic traffic from these countries I wanted to create landing pages, written in the specific languages that could be indexed. I also want these landing pages to seem like the home pages of the site. Using the same theme, sliders, js scripts, etc. These pages display products and posts from the main example.co.uk site as well using the same navigation (but written in the pages language). Rather than have x number of one page sites, that would require me to buy the theme an x number of times and either install multi-site WP or install WordPress x many times, I thought that this would be the best way. These pages are unreachable from the main site and can only be accessed when a user goes to example.fr, example.es, .etc. Does it still seem overly complicated?

    Thanks for letting me know about the rel=canonical solution. Having looked at that it seems obvious now. And I have seen this masking option you mentioned on some of the registrars settings but did not think anymore about it. That would definitely be a better way rather than using some obscure .htaccess rule.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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