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- Join Date:
- Jan 2007
- Location:
- Australia
- Posts:
- 6,263
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PatriciaWhipp:
The fix! Go to the page with the hosting menu's. Go to the "Content" menu. Under that menu go to the "URL Redirect" screen. If you have a "301 redirect", click the button to remove that..
That certainly wouldn't be the top of my list of possible causes for the symptom you describe, but on reflection I can certainly appreciate how poorly crafted redirection rules could cause those symptoms, do its definetly something for others to take note of.
My following comments are mostly to help further your understanding of URL redirects. Take it or leave it as you wish :)
PatriciaWhipp:
I believe that a year ago I was told I needed that.
There are many reasons why URL redirections are either needed or wanted. Sometimes (but not often) it is out of necessity, othertimes it is because of little more than a personal preference or need at the time.
As a general rule they are not designed to be a permanent thing, but rather, they are used as a temporary measure to avoid broken links that would result of moving things around on the server. Ideally most redirects should be removed after a few months (more or less) as the attempts to connect to the original pages diminish and the relocated pages start taking the bulk of the traffic. Sadly, very few people seem to do this though, which can ultimately cause many headaches if the pages are ever moved again, which would result in the redirects themselves having to be redirected.
PatriciaWhipp:
However, you do not want it.
As stated above, sometimes they are actually needed, and whilst I personally tend to avoid GoDaddy bashing, I really wouldn't be too surprised if their servers were set up in such a way that a redirect was needed a year ago, and that they've since changed things that made this no longer necessary.
PatriciaWhipp:
Already, in half a day, I have 5 times as many hits today as I have had this past year! Those redirects block search engines is what I was told yesterday.
Sweet (that your traffic has had such a great improvement), but, what you were told about redirects blocking search engines isn't true. The search engines will quite happily follow the redirections, but the pages they index will be the redirected pages, not the pages doing the redirections.
The increase in traffic could be A) because the redirects were 'bad' (which in your case is quite likely), IOW, they simply weren't doing what they were supposed to be doing, and causing the redirects go to non existent/invalid pages, or
B) The program of code that keeps track of the number of hits is now working correctly, where they weren't before (IOW, your hits haven't actually increased, they are simply being counted differently (real pages vs redirected pages).
Anyway, I think we can put this one to rest now. We not only have a resolution to the problem, we even have an explanation as to the cause. I've learned a little more. Hopefully you have too, and most importantly, between us we have almost certainly saved some other poor sod from from going insane in the future.
Good vibes all around :)
Cheers
Rod
