Friday, October 17, 2008

How to redirect 404 www subdomains to your main site or Google Blogger got it 404 broken again

warning: if you use Blogger for publishing, try to access your blog through its www. form - you may have this problem too

When I came back from my vacation, I was quite surprised to see that the www. form of my blog (http://www.cranked.me/ form of my blog is not getting redirected to my http://cranked.me/ site, and instead I receive a Server Not Found Error 404 message:
Amused, I ran to check all the CNAME, A, and even MX records in my DNS domain management interfaces. Everything was intact. Redirect www.cranked.me to cranked.me checkbox in Blogger dashboard was checked as well.
After half an hour of scratching my head and trial-and-error approach I have found a way that worked:
  1. Go to your Blogger dashboard->Settings->Publishing and uncheck Redirect www.yoursite.com to yoursite.com:



  2. Solve the CAPTCHA below and press SAVE SETTINGS
  3. Now, on the same page, check back Redirect www.yoursite.com to yoursite.com checkbox:



  4. Solve the CAPTCHA below and press SAVE SETTINGS
  5. Wait a couple of minutes and try to access your site/blog through it's www. form - it should work.

Explanation? Google uses Name-based virtual hosting to host all sites. Somehow, maybe while updating Blogger engine, the setting of Redirect www.yoursite.com to yoursite.com checkbox got messed up, and Blogger was no more redirecting the www- form of your blog to your main blog. This could cause a loss of some PageRank and problems with sites like Alexa or Domaintools which often use www- form to access your website.

Luckily, we got everything covered up :)
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Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Back in business

My vacation is coming to end.
I'm writing this post as I sit on a plane home.
Korean 'hello' greeting 안녕하세요 'anniong haseyo' [ANION: HASEJO:] literally means 'my soul is at peace, and yours?'
My soul is at peace. I feel very relaxed and at ease. Refreshed and ready for action.
For my vacation, I took almost a hitchhikers route through Central and Eastern Europe. (Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, Russia). The original plan was to end up in Russia - just like my friend Markus did once, however, I got 'delayed' in Ukraine :)
Ukrainian girls are beautiful and sweet as always.
Roads in western Ukraine are very nice. With markup even in smallest villages, and - omg - flashing lights on signs.
There were also a lot of shoplifting shopping in Prague.
I didn't want to go home.

--- Offtopic ends here ---

I've spent as much time as I could replying to e-mails and following people back on Twitter.

Some things I have also managed to notice, even while being on vacation:

  1. Judging from analytics statistics, Google Chrome now has around 2.5% market share - and this is statistics from different sites, not only SEO - oriented.
  2. I've discovered a strange Google page - http://google.com/home. Wonder how it's functionality is connected with 'home' keyword in url.
  3. There is also a problem with www. subdomains redirect with Google hosting which I will describe in my next post.


I will also upload some photos - just need to get back to my notebook.