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
-
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/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]</ifmodule>END WordPress
Do I have something incorrectly coded in these .htaccess files that could be causing this? Or is there something else I should look at? Thank you for any help!!
-
I combined the htaccess files (putting the blog rewrite rule to the bottom of the file) now having just one htacess in the root directory and unfortunately it did not work. When I tried it, all the links on the blog would not work, they were all "page not found" so I reverted it back to what I originally had... Here is what the combined htaccess file looked like:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.htm\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.htm$ 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!
-
Hey Debora,
Any luck?
Keith
-
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.
-
Yes as I said above

-
Thanks for your response Keith, I'll give it a try and let you know!
-
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?
-
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
-
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?
-
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/$1 [R=301,L]Let me know if that stops it looping...
Keith
-
Try here. Maybe that will help.
Edit: Pretty sure it's your root directory .htaccess file that is causing the looping. I'd start with that.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Removing the Trailing Slash in Magento
Hi guys, We have noticed trailing slash vs non-trailing slash duplication on one of our sites. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brandonegroup
Duplicate: https://www.example.com.au/living/
Preferred: https://www.example.com.au/living So, SEO-wise, we suggested placing a canonical tag on all trailing slash pointing to non-trailing slash. However, devs have advised against removing the trailing slash from some URLs with a blanket rule, as this may break functionality in Magento that depends on the trailing slash. The full site would need to be tested after implementing a blanket rewrite rule. Is any other way to address this trailing slash duplication issue without breaking anything in Magento? Keen to hear from you guys. Cheers,0 -
Help with force redirect HTTP to HTTPS
Hi, I'm unsure of where I should be putting the following code for one of my Wordpress websites so that they redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS. RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] This is my current htaccess file: *missing
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Easigrass0 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Domain Redirect and SSL Cert
Hi, When redirecting an entire site to another domain, do you have to maintain the SSL certificate? The SSL expires 3 days before the planned redirect. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sofla_seo0 -
Blog subdomain not redirecting
Over the last few weeks I have been focused on fixing high and medium priority issues, as reported by the Moz crawler, after a recent transition to WordPress. I've made great progress, getting the high priority issues down from several hundred (various reasons, but many duplicates for things like non-www and www versions) to just five last week. And then there's this weeks report. For reasons I can't fathom, I am suddenly getting hundreds of duplicate content pages of the form http://blog.<domain>.com</domain> (being duplicates with the http://www.<domain>.com</domain> versions). I'm really unclear on why these suddenly appeared. I host my own WordPress site ie WordPress.org stuff. In Options / General everything refers to http://www.<domain>.com</domain> and has done for a number of weeks. I have no idea why the blog versions of the pages have suddenly appeared. FWIW, the non-www version of my pages still redirect to the www version, as I would expect. I'm obviously pretty concerned by this so any pointers greatly appreciated. Thanks. Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
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 | | Stew2220 -
How long should a domain redirect take?
Hi, I know that this is a 'How long is a piece of string?' type question but at what point should the ranking value of site A pass over to site B following a domain 301 redirect? I have shifted a domain over to a new URL, same hosting server, same IP address. I haven't made any URL changes or any content changes other than to change the site logo to match the new domain name. Domain B is basically an exact clone of domain A. I have redirected Domain A to domain B using the following line at the top of the .htaccess file:- Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/ I have submitted a sitemap for the new domain via google webmaster tools. It looks like the original domain as been completely indexed by google following the redirect as all rankings have been dropped from the results and there are no results for a site:olddomain.com search. Surely the rankings should have switched over at this point? Any help would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
Ade.0 -
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 | | AndyMacLean0