I read with interest this post on the WSJ detailing Topix.net Chief Executive Rich Skrenta’s worries about losing search engine referred traffic. His concern is that a lot of search results still points to the topix.net domain and therefore diverting traffix away from their recently acquired for US$1 million topix.com domain.
Bargh… typical executive syndrome, being worried about something that can literally be solved with a few lines of code. I mean, you can spend a million or a domain name without thinking beforehand how to divert existing traffic?
Mr. Skrenta, I’ll give you a solution here for almost free, just stick this line somewhere at the top of your topix.net webroot’s .htaccess file (please let your web server admin read this if you don’t have a clue about what I just said):
# Move topix.net traffic to topix.com
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^topix.net
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.topix.net
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.topix.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
Not only does the lines above redirect traffic from topix.net to topix.com, it also tells the search engines you’re so worried about that these pages have moved permanently and please give the new pages whatever pagerank the older ones got.
No, I won’t ask for yet another million bucks from your coffers. Linking to HTNet on all Topix.com and Topix.net pages would do just fine 
March 14th, 2007 at 11:05 am
It should say
BaseEngine /
RewriteEngine ON
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?topix\.net [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.topix.com/1 [R=301,L]
putting just a ^www without \. will kill the server and btw, they use IIS!
geez rite?
azrin @ http://www.azrin.net
March 14th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
No they don’t, they use Apache on a Gentoo host. Check their response headers
The BaseEngine and RewriteEngine directives are environment dependent. So it might be optional to put them in.
March 14th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
OMG! Im already puzzled! You guys really warrior in this coding thing. So Azmeen, Help me later, ok. I got some serious thing to solve. buzz me at yahoo msgr!
March 15th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
HTTP headers doesn’t mean much, but they are either a NIX *(includes OS2,Mac etc) or IIS based, and pretty much the web servers comply to W3C GNU codes.
March 16th, 2007 at 7:12 am
What the… forget it. Just go here or any other response header viewer. Of course web servers have to comply with HTTP standards. How could they be web servers without complying to HTTP?
And just FYI, the HTTP protocol has nothing to do with GNU.
May 4th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
[...] context, let me explain. Domains are big business. You’ve probably heard about the recent $1 million purchase price of Topix.com. Some people speculate on the potential worth of a domain name in hope to make a quick buck by [...]