First let me say “Welcome Back!”. Not to you, to me! It’s been forever since I posted something here, been busy at EveryJoe.com so hopefully you’re catching some of the stuff I’m writing over there. But for now we’re going to focus on letting you know how to set redirects on GoDaddy hosting service.
I spent some time this evening trying to work out how to set some auto-redirects for URL’s for a client. To practice I decided to setup some links for my domain that automatically redirect to other profiles for me on some social networks.
For example, if you now go to https://bnpositive.com/facebook you’ll be redirected to my long Facebook URL at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=502473549. I also setup the same thing for https://bnpositive.com/twitter which redirects to my twitter page.
This won’t be what we’re doing for a client, but it was a good practice and test. Also, if I change all of the links I use to direct people to my various online presences, I should be able to start tracking how much traffic my website is generating to these other networks for my exposure.
The problem today though was that the process for setting up these redirects. I know how to setup redirects in the header of various web pages in both HTML and .aspx pages. The problem with that solution is that I’d have to setup an actual page for each URL I wanted to use and then manage those pages independently. There’s a better way!
One way would be to modify the .htaccess file to setup your own internal redirects. I didn’t have access to this (I thought I did) with GoDaddy.com. The good news is that GoDaddy.com provides a Site Redirect tool to accomplish this task. The bad news is that it wasn’t too obvious and user-friendly for the end-user in my opinion.
Keep reading for screen shots and details of how I accomplished my goal with GoDaddy.com