Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Get found
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Infinite Redirect Loop without trailing slash, please help

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Infinite Redirect Loop without trailing slash, please help

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    11
    3928
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • debc
      debc last edited by

      I've been searching for an answer all day, I can't seem to figure this out.

      When I Fetch my blog as Google(http://www.mysite.com/blog) WITHOUT a trailing slash at the end, I get this error:

      The page seems to redirect to itself. This may result in an infinite redirect loop

      **HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently**

      When I Fetch my blog as Google WITH the trailing slash at the end(http://www.mysite.com/blog/), it is fine without errors.

      When I pull it up in a browser comes up fine both with and without the trailing slash.

      My .htaccess file in the root directory contains this:

      RewriteEngine On
      RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.htm\ HTTP/
      RewriteRule ^index.htm$ http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L]
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$
      RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

      My .htaccess file in the blog directory contains this:

      BEGIN WordPress

      <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
       RewriteBase /blog/
       RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^./index.php/. [NC]
       RewriteRule ^index.php/(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/blog/$1 [R=301,L]
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
      RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]</ifmodule>

      END WordPress

      Do I have something incorrectly coded in these .htaccess files that could be causing this? Or is there something else I should look at? Thank you for any help!!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • debc
        debc @debc last edited by

        I combined the htaccess files (putting the blog rewrite rule to the bottom of the file) now having just one htacess in the root directory and unfortunately it did not work. When I tried it, all the links on the blog would not work, they were all "page not found" so I reverted it back to what I originally had... Here is what the combined htaccess file looked like:

        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.htm\ HTTP/
        RewriteRule ^index.htm$ http://www.example.com/ [R=301,L]
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$
        RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

        <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
         RewriteBase /blog/
         RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php/. [NC]
         RewriteRule ^index.php/(.*)$ http://www.example.com/blog/$1 [R=301,L]
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
        RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]</ifmodule>

        Thanks again for any insight!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • SEOKeith
          SEOKeith @debc last edited by

          Hey Debora,

          Any luck?

          Keith

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • GeorgeAndrews
            GeorgeAndrews @debc last edited by

            Hello Debora,

            Make sure you keep copies of your .htaccess files before you make changes and, if you can, use a test site to test your changes first before you make changes on your live website.

            I'm not sure how your website is set up so I don't know if combining the two files will accomplish what you are looking for.

            Whatever you do, make sure you have backups.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • SEOKeith
              SEOKeith @debc last edited by

              Yes as I said above 🙂

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • debc
                debc @debc last edited by

                Thanks for your response Keith, I'll give it a try and let you know!

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • debc
                  debc @GeorgeAndrews last edited by

                  Thanks George.  Please forgive me, I am a newbie at this!  I took a look at the link you provided, and I don't fully understand what they are explaining.  What I did understand is that having 2 htaccess files in different directories caused a problem with their code.  Do you think combining the two files into one on the root directory will make a difference for me?

                  SEOKeith GeorgeAndrews 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • SEOKeith
                    SEOKeith @debc last edited by

                    Sorry, I completely misread this question (I missed the part where you said you had to .htaccess files!).

                    Yes put one .htaccess file in the root dir, add the blog rewrite rule to the bottom of the file.

                    Let me know how it goes.

                    Keith

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • debc
                      debc @SEOKeith last edited by

                      Thanks Keith.  I tried it and it is still looping.  Do you think it has something to do with having 2 different .htaccess files?  Should I combine them into just one in the root directory?

                      SEOKeith debc 4 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • SEOKeith
                        SEOKeith last edited by

                        Yuk mod_rewrite...

                        Try:

                        RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.php\ HTTP/
                        RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.example.com/blog/ [R=301,L]

                        You may wish to add $1 on the end

                        RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.php\ HTTP/
                        RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.example.com/blog/$1 [R=301,L]

                        Let me know if that stops it looping...

                        Keith

                        debc 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • GeorgeAndrews
                          GeorgeAndrews last edited by

                          Try here. Maybe that will help.

                          Edit: Pretty sure it's your root directory .htaccess file that is causing the looping. I'd start with that.

                          debc 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • 1 / 1
                          • First post
                            Last post

                          Got a burning SEO question?

                          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                          Start my free trial


                          Browse Questions

                          Explore more categories

                          • Moz Tools

                            Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                          • SEO Tactics

                            Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                          • Community

                            Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                          • Digital Marketing

                            Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                          • Research & Trends

                            Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                          • Support

                            Connect on product support and feature requests.

                          • See all categories

                          Related Questions

                          • viatrading1

                            Several 301 Redirects to Same Page

                            Hi, I have 3 Pages we won't use anymore in our website. Let's call them url A, url B and url C. To keep their SEO strength on our domain, I've though about redirecting all of them to url D. For what I understand, when 301 redirecting, about 85-90% of the link SEO juice is passed. Then, if I redirect 3 URLs to the same page... does url D receive all the link SEO juices for URLs added up? (approximately)
                            e.g. future url D juice = 100% current url D juice + 85% url A juice + 85% url B juice + 85% url C juice Is this the best practice, or is there a better way? Cheers,

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
                            0
                          • Sandicliffe

                            301 Redirect Showing Up as Thousands Of Backlinks?

                            Hi Everyone, I'm currently doing quite a large back link audit on my company's website and there's one thing that's bugging me. Our website used to be split into two domains for separate areas of the business but since we have merged them together into one domain and have 301 redirected the old domain the the main one. But now, both GWT and Majestic are telling me that I've got 12,000 backlinks from that domain?  This domain didn't even have 12,000 pages when it was live and I only did specific 301 redirects (ie. for specific URL's and not an overall domain level 301 redirect) for about 50 of the URL's with all the rest being redirected to the homepage. Therefore I'm quite confused about why its showing up as so many backlinks - Old redirects I've done don't usually show as a backlink at all. UPDATE: I've got some more info on the specific back links. But now my question is - is having this many backlinks/redirects from a single domain going to be viewed negatively in Google's eyes? I'm currently doing a reconsideration request and would look to try and fix this issue if having so many backlinks from a single domain would be against Google's guidelines. Does anybody have any ideas? Probably somthing very obvious. Thanks! Sam

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sandicliffe
                            0
                          • CommT

                            Should I redirect my xml sitemap?

                            Hi Mozzers, We have recently rebranded with a new company name, and of course this necessitated us to relaunch our entire website onto a new domain. I watched the Moz video on how they changed domain, copying what they did pretty much to the letter. (Thank you, Moz for sharing this with the community!) It has gone incredibly smoothly. I told all my bosses that we may see a 40% reduction in traffic / conversions in the short term. In the event (and its still very early days) we have in fact seen a 15% increase in traffic and our new website is converting better than before so an all-round success! I was just wondering if you thought I should redirect my XML sitemap as well? So far I haven't, but despite us doing the change of address thing in webmaster tools, I can see Google processed the old sitemap xml after we did the change of address etc. What do you think? I know we've been very lucky with the outcome of this rebrand but I don't want to rest on my laurels or get tripped up later down the line. Thanks everyone! Amelia

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT
                            0
                          • Stew222

                            Too many 301 redirects?

                            Hey, My company currently has one chief website with about 500-600 other domains that all feature the same material as the chief website.  These domains have been around for about 5 years and have actually picked up some link traffic. I have all of these identical web-pages utilizing rel=canonical but I was wondering if I would be better served, from SEO purposes, to 301 redirect all of these sites to their respective pages on our chief website?  If I add 500 301 redirects, will the major search engines consider this to be black-hat link-building even though the sites are related and technically already feature the same content? For an example, the chief website is www.1099pro.com and I would 301 redirect the below sites to the chief site: 1099softwarepro.com 1099softwarepro.info 1099softwarepro.net 1099softwarepro.biz 1099softwareprofessionals.com 1099softwareprofessionals.info ...you get the point

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stew222
                            0
                          • ajarad

                            Geoip redirection, 301 or 302?

                            Hello all Let me first try to explain what our company does and what it is trying to achieve. Our company has an online store, sells products for 3 different countries, and two languages for each country. Currently we have one site, which is open to all countries, what we are trying to achieve is make 3 different stores for these 3 different countries, so we can have a better control over the prices in each country. We are going to use Geoip to redirect the user to the local store in his country. The suggested new structure is to add sub-folders as following: www.example.com/ca-en
                            www.example.com/ca-fr
                            www.example.com/us-en
                            ... If a visitor is located outside these 3 countries, then she'll be redirected to the root directory www.example.com/en We can't offer to expand our SEO team to optimize new pages for the local market, it's not the priority for now, the main objective now is to be able to control the prices for different market. so to eliminate the duplicate issue, we'll use canonical tags. Now knowing our objective from the new URL structure, I have two questions: 1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302? 
                            If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
                            if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections? 2- Knowing that Google bots comes from US-IP, does that mean that the other versions of the site won't be crawled (i.e, www.example.com/ca-fr), this is especially important for us as we are using AdWords, and unindexed pages will effect our quality score badly. I'd like to know if you have other account structure in your mind that would be better than this proposed structure. Your help is highly highly appreciated.
                            Thanks in advance.

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajarad
                            0
                          • BrianAlpert78

                            Can I make 301 redirects on a Windows server (without access to IIS)?

                            Hey everyone, I've been trying to figure out a way to set up some 301 redirects to handle the broken links left behind after a site restructuring, but I can only ever find information on 2 methods that I can't use (as far as I can tell). The first method is to do some stuff with an htaccess file, but that looks like it only works on Linux-based servers. The method described for Windows servers is generally to install this IIS rewrite/redirect module and run that, but I don't think our web hosting company allows users to log directly into the server, so I wouldn't be able to use the IIS thing. Is there any other way to get a 301 redirect set up? And is this uncommon for a web hosting company to do, or do you all just run your sites on Linux-based servers or your own Windows machines? Thanks!

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrianAlpert78
                            0
                          • Hyrule

                            Splitting one Website into 2 Different New Websites with 301 redirects, help?

                            Here's the deal. My website stbands.com does fairly well. The only issue it is facing a long term branding crisis. It sells custom products and sporting goods. We decided that we want to make a sporting goods website for the retail stuff and then a custom site only focusing on the custom stuff. One website transformed and broken into 2 new ones, with two new brand names. The way we are thinking about doing this is doing a lot of 301 redirects, but what do we do with the homepage (stbands.com) and what is the best practice to make sure we don't lose traffic to the categories, etc.? Which new website do we 301 the homepage to? It's rough because for some keywords we rank 3 or 4 times on the first page. Scary times, but something must be done for the long term. Any advise is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance. We are set for a busy next few months 🙂

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hyrule
                            0
                          • AndyMacLean

                            Subdomains and SEO - Should we redirect to subfolder?

                            A new client has mainsite.com and a large numer of city specific sub domains i.e. albany.mainsite.com. I think that these subdomains would actually work better as subfolders i.e mainsite.com/albany rather than albany.mainsite.com. The majority of links on the subdomains link to the main site anyway i.e. mainsite.com/contactus rather than albany.mainsite.com/contactus. Having mostly main domain links on a subdomain doesnt seem like clever link architecture to me and maybe even spammy. Im not overly familiar with redirecting subdomains to subfolders. If we go the route of 301'ing subdomains to subfolders any advice/warnings?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean
                            0

                          Get started with Moz Pro!

                          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                          Start my free trial
                          Products
                          • Moz Pro
                          • Moz Local
                          • Moz API
                          • Moz Data
                          • STAT
                          • Product Updates
                          Moz Solutions
                          • SMB Solutions
                          • Agency Solutions
                          • Enterprise Solutions
                          • Digital Marketers
                          Free SEO Tools
                          • Domain Authority Checker
                          • Link Explorer
                          • Keyword Explorer
                          • Competitive Research
                          • Brand Authority Checker
                          • Local Citation Checker
                          • MozBar Extension
                          • MozCast
                          Resources
                          • Blog
                          • SEO Learning Center
                          • Help Hub
                          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                          • How-to Guides
                          • Moz Academy
                          • API Docs
                          About Moz
                          • About
                          • Team
                          • Careers
                          • Contact
                          Why Moz
                          • Case Studies
                          • Testimonials
                          Get Involved
                          • Become an Affiliate
                          • MozCon
                          • Webinars
                          • Practical Marketer Series
                          • MozPod
                          Connect with us

                          Contact the Help team

                          Join our newsletter
                          Moz logo
                          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                          • Accessibility
                          • Terms of Use
                          • Privacy

                          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.