Comments on: Permanent Redirect From Root Links

By: Doug

Doug — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 16:01:06 +0000

Let’s say we have a database driven blog, which may have some variables
in the url. Example:

http://www.adomainname.com/blogs_ma/?u=me

What is your take on using a domain name and forwarding that to that blog, or forwarding and masking that domain name to that blog? How would the search engines treat each?

Thanks!

By: tom sherman

tom sherman — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 12:11:26 +0000

I have seen it elsewhere, too. It will still work, but it’s suboptimal.

In a RewriteCond, the last part is a regular expression. In a regex, a period is a special character meaning “any character.” So ^domain.com matches “domainXcom”, “domain&com”, and “domain$com”, as well as the intended “domain.com”.

By escaping the period, you’re forcing it to be interpreted literally. Thus, ^domain\.com can be interpreted only as “domain.com”. It’s unambiguous and slightly more efficient.

By: Daily SEO

Daily SEO — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 13:47:29 +0000

What would be the disadvantage of using ^domain.com ? Because I have been using this on several sites (including Daily-SEO) and never faced a problem.

By: tom sherman

tom sherman — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 05:57:02 +0000

In the RewriteCond:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com [NC]

It is more efficient and less ambiguous to write it as:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com [NC]

Because the “^domain\.com” part is a regular expression, you want to force the period to be interpreted literally.