Hecho Designs

GoDaddy.com handles URL Redirection differently then you might think.

I have to give thanks to my co-worker, Joanne, for bringing this issue to my attention. Joanne noticed that one of her clients was forwarding her secondary domain name through GoDaddy.com to her website’s homepage. She already knew that GoDaddy.com doesn’t handle domain redirection as one would expect, but she wanted to know why and what exactly goes on. Since the other members at Advanced Access were also unclear as to what negative things were occurring on GoDaddy’s end, I decided to do my own investigation into the matter.

After a bit of research I found out that when Godaddy.com forwards your domain, it handles this by first doing a 302 Temporary Redirect to a transparent web page and frames your website within that transparent site. Although end users won’t notice the frame, using frames can cause numerous problems with the search engine spiders and should be avoided whenever possible.

Once GoDaddy.com frames your domain, it then does another 302 Temporary Redirect to an unknown location (presumably a second framed website) which in turn does the actual 301 Permanent Redirection to the final destination. While Google is probably smart enough to figure out this is a 301 Permanent Redirect, I don’t believe it’s wise to make the search engine spiders go through so many roadblocks just to figure this information out.

Here is a detailed log to help you understand what’s taking place during a GoDaddy.com 301 Permanent Redirect.

1. REQUESTING: http://old-company-domain.net
GET / HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Accept:*/*
Host: old-company-domain.net

SERVER RESPONSE: 302 MOVED TEMPORARILY
Content-Length: 0
Location: /?52d504e0
Redirecting to http://old-company-domain.net/?52d504e0 …
2. REQUESTING: http://old-company-domain.net/?52d504e0
GET /?52d504e0 HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Accept:*/*
Host: old-company-domain.net

SERVER RESPONSE: 302 MOVED TEMPORARILY
Content-Length: 0
Location: /
Redirecting to http://old-company-domain.net/ …
3. REQUESTING: http://old-company-domain.net/
GET / HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Accept:*/*
Host: old-company-domain.net

SERVER RESPONSE: 301 MOVED PERMANENTLY
Location: http://new-company-domain.com
Content-Length: 0
Redirecting to http://new-company-domain.com …
4. REQUESTING: http://new-company-domain.com
GET / HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Accept:*/*
Host: new-company-domain.com

SERVER RESPONSE: 200 OK
X-Pingback: http://new-company-domain.com/xmlrpc.php
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: close

Redirect Old domain to New domain using .htaccess

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will make sure that all your directories and pages are correctly being redirected to your new domain.

The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Obviously you will need to replace “www.newdomain.com” with your actual domain name. You would think I wouldn’t need to mention that, but after working in Support for a year I now know it’s a must.

I still suggest you also contact as many backlinking sites as you can and politely update them on the location of your new website.

The .htaccess method of redirection only works on Linux servers that have the Apache Mod-Rewrite module enabled.

Advanced Access customers are SOL for the time being. This may also explain why AA has never officially endorsed GoDaddy.com and instead decided to use the more expensive registrar ItsYourDomain.com. Unlike GoDaddy.com, IYD appears to establish a 301 Permanent Redirect correctly.

Update: I was just made ware that Advanced Access offers their own domain forwarding service that handles the forwarding correctly. While it is not a free service, it is defiantly worth every penny if you care about your rankings.