Redirects in Ektron 8.6.1 - redirect

Has anyone played with the new redirect feature in Ektron 8.6?
We tested it (in 8.6.0) before upgrading and were happy with it. But when it came time to do the upgrade, Ektron had released 8.6.1, so we upgraded directly to that.
Now we are having trouble with the redirect feature. (Yes, we should have tested everything again in 8.6.1 before upgrading)
Now if we try to add a redirect rule for an existing page in the CMS, it does not work.
But if we create a redirect rule for a page the does not exist, then try to hit that address, the redirect works fine.
We need the redirects to work for existing pages in the CMS.
To clarify what "working" and "not working" means...
If I have an existing page in the CMS with manual alias of "/erc/lucien.apsx", I can create an entry in the redirect table like this...
Adding this entry generates no errors, but when I visit the page, all I see is the regular old page I created. NOT the Google site it should be redirecting to. I do not get any 404 errors.
But if I create a redirect entry for a page that does not already exist, like this...
It works perfectly. If I try to visit the /erc/fake.apsx address, I end up on the Google site, as expected.
(FYI, we create a "fake" page in the CMS for external content so we can attach metadata to it and make it searchable in taxonomies, but then provide a link to the "real" page. I want to use redirects here so users don't have to do this extra click)

I suspect it might be cache related -- the original URL gets cached as an alias, then subsequent requests to that URL are redirected to the quicklink without the need for a db look up. When you add the redirect, it’s probably not clearing the old item from the cache. I'd try an IIS reset after you add the URL redirect and see if that clears up the issue.

An "outside the box" (of Ektron) answer to this is to place the redirect at the web server rather than in the Aliases section of the Ektron CMS.
The server I work on uses IIS and I have this set up for several pages.

Related

Facebook showing page not found when sharing link

I'm sharing content from a website and every time I paste the link into Facebook it says 'page not found'.
Sometimes it works when I manually add the 'www.' in front of the URL in the address bar.
EXAMPLE
Shows page not found:
http://roundreviews.co.uk/reviews/speakers/native-union-monocle-speaker/
Works when you manually place www. in front:
www.roundreviews.co.uk/reviews/speakers/native-union-monocle-speaker/
I honestly have no I idea why it's doing this, any thoughts on how it can be fixed on the web side?
Also...
I have tried with the link below with both the www. and without yet it doesn't work with either of them, this is all very strange. This is the only link I have tried and it doesn't work with both:
www.roundreviews.co.uk/microphones/spark-digital-microphone/
Any help is much appreciated, thanks.
For me what it worked was to access the Facebook Debugger, as Goose said.
I saw that the scrape was about 12 hours ago, looks like it fetches the first time and saves it as caché or whatsoever...
What it worked for me is to debug the url, then click "fetch new scrape information" after the previous information has been shown.
Hope it works!
For those running across this today, you might find that you also need to verify your domain and link it to your page.
To do this you need to
Set up a Facebook Business Account
Add your page to the business account
Verify your domain (using DNS TXT or adding a page facebook gives you)
Under domains, connect your page as an asset of that domain

How to prevent Google from indexing redirect URL I do not own

A domainname that I do not own, is redirecting to my domain. I don´t know who owns it and why it is redirecting to my domain.
This domain however is showing up in Googles search results. When doing a whois it also returns this message:
"Domain:http://[baddomain].com webserver returns 307 Temporary Redirect"
Since I do not own this domain I cannot set a 301 redirect, or disable it. When clicking the baddomain in Google it shows the content of my website but the baddomain.com stays visible in the URL bar.
My question is: How can I stop Google from indexing and showing this bad domain in the search results and only show my website instead?
Thanks.
Some thoughts:
You cannot directly stop Google from indexing other sites, but what you could do is add the cannonical tag to your pages so Google can see that the original content is located on your domain and not "bad domain".
For example check out : https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en
Other actions can be taken SEO wise if the 'baddomain' is outscoring you in the search rankings, because then it sounds like your site could use some optimizing.
The better your site and domain rank in the SERPs, the less likely it is that people will see the scraped content and 'baddomain'.
You could however also look at the referrer for the request and if it is 'bad domain' you should be able to do a redirect to your own domain, change content etc, because the code is being run from your own server.
But that might be more trouble than it's worth as you'd need to investigate how the 'baddomain' is doing things and code accordingly. (properly iframe or similar from what you describe, but that can still be circumvented using scripts).
Depending on what country you and 'baddomain' are located in, there are also legal actions. So called DMCA complaints. This however can also be quite a task, and well - it's often not worth it because a new domain will just pop up.

Access Denied from aweber redirect

One of my pages in my domain is set up as a redirect from aweber, so when I confirm on the link on an email optin from aweber it redirects to this page MyPage.html and includes a welcome message with the name I signed up with.
Now granted I am not sure if this is something to do with aweber set up for redirect although it's very easy to do (basically paste the URL in settings you want to redirect to) and I have double/triple checked it. I also contacted aweber support who said it can be the javascript for personalisation embedded in the Head section of the redirect page that can cause this error. I have removed this code and can confirm it is not the javascript or redirect causing it hence my appearance here.
I also have another portion of the site using this redirect and personalisation and it works fine.
Now when I click on the link in my email from aweber it gives me this error:
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /mypage.html on this server.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an >ErrorDocument to handle the request.
And the redirect URL is below so I can see it is redirecting with my details ok but failing to give me access to the page.
mysite.com/mypage.html?email=myemail%40yahoo.co.uk&from=myemail%40yahoo.co.uk&meta_adtracking=my_web_site&meta_message=1001&name=MyName&unit=MyAweberListName&add_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.MySite.com%2FthankyouPage.html&add_notes=xx.xx.xx.xxx
All my pages have access permission 644 and the page is a copy of one of my other pages, which works fine, I've not added anything, changed anything, only removed text lines and graphics.
I just also tried remaking the landing page and it failed once more. Funnily enough though when I manually type the page into the URL bar up it comes; this worked before with the original page as well!
This works:
mysite.com/mypage.html
This [redirect] doesn't and gives the error described above
mysite.com/mypage.html?email=myemail%40yahoo.co.uk&from=myemail%40yahoo.co.uk&meta_adtracking=my_web_site&meta_message=1001&name=MyName&unit=MyAweberListName&add_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.MySite.com%2FthankyouPage.html&add_notes=xx.xx.xx.xxx
Any ideas on getting to the bottom of this would be greatly appreciated.
Host is hostgator

Adding more than 1000 301 redirects in drupal site

I am using drupal 6.
I worked on the site revamp for one of our clients and we needed to redirect the old site urls to relevant new site urls so that we do not loose the traffic. I have used path redirect module for same and added some of the urls.
The issue is we have more than 1000 urls to be added and there is no specific pattern (as old site was in asp.) so it would be 1 to 1 mapping for redirect. Adding it in url alias table via path redirect module is something which is hitting the site performance and again it is a manual process.
Is there any other better and optimal solution for this scenerio?
http://drupal.org/project/path_redirect_import
This module has import feature out of the box.
I'm interpreting this question as a question of performance (not a question of the ease of populating many redirects). Please correct me if I've misunderstood your question.
Put redirects in .htaccess
If you're using Apache, then your alternative is to put the redirects directly into your .htaccess configurations. There should be a similar configuration option for this for IIS as well.
This still means that you would have to create the 1 to 1 mapping for each redirect you want, but the redirects are not stored in your database so it saves hits to the db.
Advantages to using Path Redirect module
Note that the Path Redirect module can log when a redirect was last accessed. This statistic/tracking can help you remove redirects that are no longer in use in the long run.
There are posts on the Path Redirect issue queue that suggest that 1000 redirects should not be a problem but every setup is different. You will need to perform your own benchmarking to check the performance of your particular site.

How to do popup on new site for 301 redirected users?

I have just migrated a site to a new domain (with new design) and am redirecting from the old site to the new with .htaccess and redirect 301. Since the new site is quite different, I'm concerned that users might be disoriented. Is there a way to have a popup on the new site that users get only if they have been redirected from the old site? Have been searching on this but keywords seem to lead only to stuff on popup redirects to another site.
I can think of several ways to do it:
Redirect in the 301 to another page (www.blah.com/tour instead of www.blah.com) and there i would put the logic to show the popup
Redirect in the 301 to another page and there set a cookie and redirect to the original page. Then, add logic to the original page to show the popup if the cookie is present (and delete the cookie)
Check the referrer in the new site and if it matches the old one, show the popup
Your problem boils down to detecting a request that has come via a 301 redirect - popups and usability are a separate (simpler?!) issue.
Unfortunately, detecting a 301 redirect is one of those inexact things that requires a mixture of techniques to get near to 100%. I say near, but never quite there - a bit like browser detection.
One option is to append a querystring (GET) parameter to the redirected URL, e.g.
www.example.com/LandingPage.html?isRedirected=true
You could also set the same info in a cookie (but won't work if cookies are disabled or cleared).
Another option is checking the Referrer header - but again, these may differ based on browser implementation and can be faked, although if someone's faking a redirect I don't think you need to worry about guiding them through your new design!