Best way to 301 redirect on shared server

[Stealth1]

I am on a shared server and my host says they won't turn on the rewrite engine so I was wondering what the best way to use a 301 redirect would be? I basically want to make sure the page always goes to www.xxxx.com if the user types xxxx.com

[MrPhil]

Your host won't let you do URL rewrites? Better find another host. Or are you on a Windows server, which doesn't have a rewrite engine? Presumably there's some way to do it on Windows, but don't ask me!

 

I take it that both xxxx.com and www.xxxx.com go to the same site, but for SEO purposes you want to encourage www.xxxx.com usage via a 301. Unfortunately, this would involve some modification to each page. Perhaps you could stick some code at the top of application_top.php to examine the $HTTP_REFERER variable (or maybe $_SESSION['HTTP_REFERER']?) and see if it's 'xxxx.com'. If it is, do a

header('Location: www.xxxx.com' . $REQUEST_URI, 301);

or something like that. You'll have to play with it to get the right magical incantation, depending on your server setup and PHP version. Make sure you call such a header() function before anything that starts writing the page content to the browser, or you'll get a "cannot modify header" error.

[Stealth1]

Server OS: Linux 2.6.18-164.6.1.el5.centos.plus

HTTP Server: Apache/2.2.14 (Unix)

 

I just did a test I found via google to see if mod rewrite is enabled and according to the test it is enabled although when I asked my hosting company they said that it couldn't be enabled on a shared server.

 

Yes I would prefer to have it setup like this for SEO purposes.

 

I guess I will see if I can use Mod Rewrite and if so this saves me alot of hassle.

 

If my store is in www.xxx.com/store do I need to do the Rewrite stuff for this or can I do it just on the main www.xxx.com?

[Stealth1]

Nevermind, did the 301 redirect on my main site and it is now working for all other areas. hoping this will improve my rankings.