What’s causing this 301 redirect loop

301-redirectapache-2.2

I have several Redirect directives in my Ubuntu /etc/apache2/sites-available file:

    Redirect 301 /rss.xml http://example.com/feed/index.xml
    Redirect 301 /atom.xml http://example.com/feed/atom/index.xml
    Redirect 301 /feed/ http://example.com/feed/index.xml
    Redirect 301 /feed http://example.com/feed/index.xml

They all work correctly, so far as I can tell.

However, when I visit http://example.com/feed/index.xml with web-sniffer.net, it returns a 301 pointing at http://example.com/feed/index.xmlindex.xml, which then gets redirected to http://example.com/feed/index.xmlindex.xmlindex.xml, and so forth.

It seems that one of the patterns is matching when I don't expect it to. If I omit the last two redirects, the looping is stopped, but then I'm not redirecting /feed and /feed/ when I should.

Any ideas of how make this work correctly?

(I think the problem is related to this question: Infinite redirect loop?)

Best Answer

Redirect is simple prefix matching and "[a]dditional path information beyond the matched URL-Path will be appended to the target URL."

Thus /feed/index.xml matches your third rule /feed/ with additional path information index.xml so it gets redirected to /feed/index.xml with index.xml appended to it.

The solution is to use RedirectMatch and use anchors:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/rss.xml$ http://example.com/feed/index.xml
RedirectMatch 301 ^/atom.xml$ http://example.com/feed/atom/index.xml
RedirectMatch 301 ^/feed/$ http://example.com/feed/index.xml
RedirectMatch 301 ^/feed$ http://example.com/feed/index.xml

Related Solutions

IIS 6 – Set Up 301 Redirect for Non-WWW to WWW for SEO

You should define two websites in IIS; one should be a "dummy" site that only answers to "company.com" and redirects to "www.company.com", and the other should be your "real" site that answers to "www.company.com".

you can't do both on the same site using IIS redirection, or you'll be stuck in an infinite loop (as you already noticed).

.htaccess redirect not preserving http_referer header

RFC doesn't specify any referrer-specific behavior in status 301 definition, nor 301-specific behavior in Referer header definition. Thus, I have to say that although this referrer-preserving behavior is logical, it is not defined in RFC and thus you can never be sure.

In short i don't belive you will be able to acomplish this with either redirect or mod_rewrite.

Your best bet would be to make a simple php code to redirect the user which will maintain the HTTP_REFERER.

Put a file named index.php on your domain root with the bellow content:

<?php
   header( 'Location: http://www.oursite.com/' ) ;
?>

Make a .htaccess and put it in your domain root directory with the bellow content:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index.php$
RewriteRule . index.php

The .htaccess file will take care that anything typed to reach your domain will hit the index.php and the index.php will take care for redirecting to the site it needs to hit.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

IIS 6 – Set Up 301 Redirect for Non-WWW to WWW for SEO

.htaccess redirect not preserving http_referer header

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