Permanent redirects (301) not working

aharown07's picture

They have: 43 posts

Joined: Oct 2008

My site is on a cPanel enabled server. I've got a bunch of 404's in my log to mysite.org/feed and mysite.org/rss.php
At least one of these was once a valid url at my site, but is no longer.

So I tried setting up permanent redirects... make both of these point to
http://mysite.org/front/rss.xml

But for some reason, the original url's still 404. Have I missed something? Is there a reason that a redirect can't go to an xml file?

(Several of my other redirects are working fine)

aharown07's picture

They have: 43 posts

Joined: Oct 2008

I should mention that I tested the destination url directly in a browser and found that it worked fine. So the redirect is not happening for some reason.

greg's picture

He has: 1,581 posts

Joined: Nov 2005

Can you show us the redirect code you are using (I presume in htaccess).
Also, the URLs that are 404.

If you are using htaccess, does your server have the ReWriteEngine on by default? If not, you need to do this in the htaccess too.

aharown07's picture

They have: 43 posts

Joined: Oct 2008

The redirects I've put in place so far I created with a cPanel applet... so I don't know where they actually live or what they look like. I haven't attempted any in .htaccess yet.

What's curious to me is that most of the redirects work, but some don't... can't figure out why that would be.

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

I'd probably get rid of those and do it through .htaccess. Then you can see exactly what's going on.

Is there any reason why you wanted to use cPanel instead? Is it just the redirects going to the xml file that aren't working? Maybe something cpanel is doing is distorting code or something... maybe it's not set up to work with xml? Who knows.

aharown07's picture

They have: 43 posts

Joined: Oct 2008

I could try that. Only reason I went w/the cPanel is that it's there, it's easy to use and I've never attempted it in .htaccess so... I don't really know the proper syntax.
Plenty of places I can read up on that, but it's definitely not familiar territory.

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

Don't worry, it's easy Smiling

They have: 25 posts

Joined: Sep 2009

Have you tried a htaccess file?

aharown07's picture

They have: 43 posts

Joined: Oct 2008

Not yet. Mostly now I'm working on reducing the 404's a bit. But most of my 404's are coming from crawlers that are--for some odd reason--still looking for pages that are not there (despite excluding them in robots.txt).

Learning to write redirects in .htaccess has to wait until I have some time.

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