I used the 301 redirect and

Wade H — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:29:53 +0000

I used the 301 redirect and it works perfectly. I had to contact my host company as there were some quirky things I had to do to make it work, but I now have a couple of shortened urls that I use that work great. I created http://immfinancial.com/ar.htm to connect to http://immfinancial.com/Accounts_Receivable_Finance_quote.html and http://immfinancial.com/pf.htm to connect to http://immfinancial.com/Project_Financing_quote.html.

It is not as short as using the tiny url generators but this way all the links are to my site, not a 3rd party site that I have no control over.

Thanks for the help everyone!

Have a look on

paulsmith789 — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:49:57 +0000

Have a look on http://www.onodot.com Cloaking on subdomains doesn't look like cloaked url. This tool also masking url.

Thanks for all your help...I

Wade H — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:27:37 +0000

Thanks for all your help...I have it working properly now.

Wade

Tinyurl will redirect to

seomarketing — Fri, 29 May 2009 09:54:06 +0000

Tinyurl will redirect to that link only anyway the click will count right.

Wade H wrote: redirect 301

greg — Fri, 29 May 2009 07:11:00 +0000

Wade H wrote:

redirect 301 /immfinancial.com/ar.htm http://www.immfinancial.com/Accounts_Receivable_Finance_quote.html

As the second url you put there (the one to redirect to) is valid as I clicked it and went to that page, and the first url (the one you are redirecting from) doesn't have to exist, I'd say there is something wrong with the htaccess file or your server config.

Does you hosting allow htaccess to be used - some dont although it is rare? Have you named it exactly ".htaccess"? Is it in the root directory of your site's directory?

Most common - Is the re-write engine set to on within apache?
Try this at the top of your htaccess file:

# initialize and enable rewrite engine
RewriteEngine on

If it still doesn't work by adding the above, underneath the above code (leave it in) add this:
Options +FollowSymLinks
This second code is only required in some configurations.

Thirdly, if all the above additional code doesn't help, leave the two additional codes still in the htaccess and try the following INSTEAD of your original redirect code:
Redirect permanent /immfinancial.com/ar.htm http://www.immfinancial.com/Accounts_Receivable_Finance_quote.html

Although I'm guessing turning on the rewrite engine will solve it and your original 301 code will work fine.

BTW, if when you add something to your htaccess and you then test the site and you get a 500 error, the code you added in the htaccess is bad/incorrect/causes a major problem. This is why unless you are experienced with htaccess you should add one thing at a time and then test the site.
Obviously a 500 error for you is the same for your visitors, and importantly will give a 500 on ALL pages.

Thanks for the suggestion

Wade H — Fri, 29 May 2009 01:42:33 +0000

Thanks for the suggestion Nick, but I do not have identical pages, there is just the one set of form pages I want to link to using a shortened url as apposed to the long one.

I am not very advanced at this yet, really just figuring it out as I go, and I just need a way to create a short url to direct to the longer url pages as they have important forms that I use.

I did try the 301 redirect as shown above, but it is not working for some reason, if someone could tell me what I have wrong in the code above I would really appreciate it.

Thanks

Wade

If the short url and the

NickD — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:19:13 +0000

If the short url and the long url both point to identical pages within the same domain you would be better off using canonicalization.
This basically tells the search engines that the two pages are identical, and passes the link juice from one page to the other (nice huh). It also has the added bonus that you will not be penalised for duplicate content for the two identical pages.
All you need to do is insert
rel="canonical" full_original_long_url_goes_here
into the head tag of the page on your short url.
(this only works for pages in the same domain)
You can also use this attribute on index pages
For example:

domain/index
domain/folder/index

Hope this helps.

This is exactly what I

Wade H — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:32:34 +0000

This is exactly what I entered 1 line below the existing text in the .htaccess file on my main directory:

redirect 301 /immfinancial.com/ar.htm http://www.immfinancial.com/Accounts_Receivable_Finance_quote.html

It does not do anything, I followed the instructions on http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm I believe, but I get a 404 error. Suggestions?

Yes, that looks right. Make

Megan — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:55:57 +0000

Yes, that looks right. Make sure to test it right away to make sure

Can I ask you, is this

Wade H — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:28:31 +0000

Can I ask you, is this correct? I insert this into the .htaccess file on the root directory below everything else.

redirect 301 /immfinancial.com/AR.htm http://immfinancial.com/Accounts_Receivable_Finance_quote.html

This way I can make the "short url" http://immfinancial.com/AR.htm and the redirect will take them to http://immfinancial.com/Accounts_Receivable_Finance_quote.html.

Then I repeat the same function for each category/page I want to do the standard redirect for.

Is this correct?

Thanks so much Megan.

Wade