Hardcode Domain Redirection

    • 629 posts
    September 12, 2020 4:52 AM EDT

    I'm not sure if you're aware. Currently, if you own multiple domains and set them into the same path structure on the server. Or even if you redirect the domain to the same place, such as in the case of WWW, you are shown the same site nakedly per domain preference.

    The problem is, that's not unique. This tends to hurt search engines as well. Because it doesn't know what domain the main site is based from when public. But also, if you have company domains like socialengine.com and socialenginecommunity.com and say they are built on CPanel. And you added one of those domains as an add on. You could also access the same site by using community.socialengine.com even though it's an add on that redirects the folder path structure to socialenginecommunity.com as well.

    The issue, is that people could use this loophole to brand other domains with Social Engine community instances. It also negates HTTPS redirection because no preference is exclusively being set.

    To prevent this, you'd need to add a redirect path to the licensed domain. Then further set restrictions on how that domain should look uniformly. So if socialengine.com and community.socialengine.com and socialenginecommunity.com redirected me to just one URL socialengine.com as per the license domain set in the account area, this issue would go away. Further setting this into being, would be the full URL you plan to use for that domain. This would fix search engine, browser login problems and social engine license requirements in one move.

    Basically I'm saying, make as per our example, community.socialengine.com, socialengine.com, socialenginecommunity.com redirect to https://www.socialengine.com if this was the domain in the account area on Social Engine basic setup.

    Thank you for considering my request. I have no screenshots.

    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    September 12, 2020 4:58 AM EDT

    Can you please check our stickied guidelines for feature requests and format it like that? I'm not sure about this. If community.socialengine.com redirected to socialengine.com , no one would be able to come here would they? Our redirects here are handled by route53 at Amazon too as we've a specific set up, as well as htaccess configurations in BryZar as the community is on BryZar and the main is on Amazon. So it's harder to use this community as an example. Even the demo. Can you flesh this out more as this is not my area of expertise so I need a little more direction on this. Thank you!

    • 629 posts
    September 12, 2020 5:19 AM EDT

    Ok maybe that was a bad example to use.

    All I'm getting at, is that there's no redirection to the licensed domain on social engine sites. I'm able to have different versions of the same site nakedly displayed as those versions.

    Maybe I'm not explaining this right.

    Take example.com for instance.

    Say if that was a social engine site, that's what someone would set as a licensed domain. That's what they target for search engines.

    You have already, 4 different versions of example.com being nakedly displayed when social engine is set up there.

    http://example.com

    https://example.com

    http://www.example.com

    https://www.example.com

    They don't redirect to just https://www.example.com so if Google doesn't display https://www.example.com in the search results, but displays http://example.com instead, it sees 4 websites that's unique.

    I think the term they call that is canonical URL.

    Social Engine needs canonical URL support. Currently, any domain that's connected to the server path structure public_html or where ever your folder exists, uniquely advertises the community from that URL. That's why I set socialenginecommunity.com community.socialengine.com and socialengine.com as an example. If they pointed to the same social engine instance, currently that instance would be branded on each domain, rather than just one.

    Think about it as having multiple back doors to the same house. You instruct people to go to the back door, but you don't tell them which one. And they're seeing multiple, but in your mind, it's just the one you're expecting people to come through. You aren't expecting them to see your windows as extra doors. So while you may have other domains or even canonical URLs that redirect to your site, example.com should automatically redirect to https://www.example.com by default. When people type in the domain of a site in their address bar, like community.socialengine.com in their web browser. They aren't taken to https://community.socialengine.com, they're only taken to http://community.socialengine.com because canonical URL support is missing. If you had bought socialenginecommunity.com and redirected it to point to community.socialengine.com as a CNAME record for instance, or even to the same folder structure, or server, you'd see this site nakedly on all different canonical URLs of both community.socialengine.com and socialenginecommunity.com at the same time. The process is repeated for any additional domains being pointed, because no one specific URL is being specified as the main door to the house.

    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    September 12, 2020 5:39 AM EDT

    That is set by the client in their htaccess per the tutorial (but it is server specific) so this is something the client really needs to work on as there are different configurations. Last time we tried to put something specific in for that, it broke on Ubuntu. When we fixed it for Ubuntu, it broke on CentOS. The tutorial to set the redirect will work for most servers but not all. For example, with special security settings a host will tweak the redirect to work. The main issue seems to always be in the package manager area as that is a special area and if the redirect is done wrong for the server configuration, that area won't work at all. I will leave your request up for us to look at it again in v6 but I don't think we can do much due to the many servers out there.

     

    For this site, we had it redirecting but new security updates had to have the redirects only for some things.