Friday, October 17, 2008

How to redirect 404 www subdomains to your main site or Google Blogger got it 404 broken again

warning: if you use Blogger for publishing, try to access your blog through its www. form - you may have this problem too

When I came back from my vacation, I was quite surprised to see that the www. form of my blog (http://www.cranked.me/ form of my blog is not getting redirected to my http://cranked.me/ site, and instead I receive a Server Not Found Error 404 message:
Amused, I ran to check all the CNAME, A, and even MX records in my DNS domain management interfaces. Everything was intact. Redirect www.cranked.me to cranked.me checkbox in Blogger dashboard was checked as well.
After half an hour of scratching my head and trial-and-error approach I have found a way that worked:
  1. Go to your Blogger dashboard->Settings->Publishing and uncheck Redirect www.yoursite.com to yoursite.com:



  2. Solve the CAPTCHA below and press SAVE SETTINGS
  3. Now, on the same page, check back Redirect www.yoursite.com to yoursite.com checkbox:



  4. Solve the CAPTCHA below and press SAVE SETTINGS
  5. Wait a couple of minutes and try to access your site/blog through it's www. form - it should work.

Explanation? Google uses Name-based virtual hosting to host all sites. Somehow, maybe while updating Blogger engine, the setting of Redirect www.yoursite.com to yoursite.com checkbox got messed up, and Blogger was no more redirecting the www- form of your blog to your main blog. This could cause a loss of some PageRank and problems with sites like Alexa or Domaintools which often use www- form to access your website.

Luckily, we got everything covered up :)
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