Help with index.html and .htaccess

elvisshades · 03-13-2008, 01:53 PM

Hi guys,
So right now my site it setup as a portal page as the front page which then will get you to my forum (/forum) though a link on the portal page.

For some reason, when you go to www.mysite.com you get redirected to www.mysite.com/forum/portal.php. Functionally, that works fine but I'm trying to get it to go to the portal.php but without it saying www.mysite.com/forum/portal.php on the address bar. I'm losing my google PR of 2 on www.mysite.com and have no ranking on www.mysite.com/forum/portal.php. I've tried everything I can think of using .htaccess and the index.html in my root but I think I'm just doing something wrong.

Currently, my .htaccess (in root) is: DirectoryIndex forum/portal.php index.php index.html index.htm.

The index.html (in root) is:
<html>
<head>
<title>Redirecting...</title>
<<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=forum/portal.php">
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

What should I change or take out? Thanks guys...this has been a pain in the neck for the last week!

elvisshades · 03-14-2008, 09:59 AM

FYI - I've deleted the index.html file completely from the root and now I'm just using the .htaccess file.
Any ideas?

Izzmo · 03-14-2008, 12:16 PM

The only way to get it to not say portal.php is to design it so portal.php is your index.php, if that makes sense.

Aside from actually editing your domain config to just say yourdomain.com forwhatever page your on (probably not a good idea for gaining PR), then that is the best way.

nic · 03-14-2008, 04:40 PM

It appears to me all you want is "page rank", secondly, that's about it with refitting your system, you lose the initial structure that gave it any PR with google.
I think your fighting it the wrong way.
Since you changed the destination, be sure to do all of that you did on the original page for meta information and content conformity.

elvisshades · 04-03-2008, 11:09 PM

For anyone who was following along, this is how I fixed it:

I kept the .htaccess file in root, removed the index.html file. Then I added <base href="http://www.mysite.com/forum/"> to the overall_header.tpl. It worked like a charm!