For some reason when doing this, I always get the mental image of leaning over the bar and suckling directly from the beertap rather than having the barman pour me a glass.

Fortunately the necessary HTTP is very brief and you prepare it in an editor beforehand. This example assumes you want to check boakes.org for redirects:

get / HTTP/1.1
host: boakes.org

That’s two lines with text, then one blank line. If you then fire up your telnet software:

telnet boakes.org 80

and then paste the prepared http code, and hit enter, you’ll either see an HTTP response that contains a redirect header, or you’ll see the requested page.

Now change the http request:

get / HTTP/1.1
host: www.boakes.org

and reconnect:
telnet www.boakes.org 80

…and compare with your previous output, one has a referral header and one doesn’t.

The important lines in the referral header are these two:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://boakes.org/index.php

The first one contains a 301 result code that instrructs the browser that it needs to ask somewhere else. The location line tells the browser where to look.

Now; on your particular server I see that you’re running Plesk, and I noticed the following Plesk Server Admin (2.5) manual:

Check or uncheck the WWW prefix checkbox to determine whether the given domain will allow the www prefix to be used to access the domain.

So it sounds like it’s “a feature”, and may be a cause in your redirect is failing.

From a Google perspective, the upshot of the same content being available from two uri’s has historically resulted in a split pagerank – but it sounds like BigDaddy may solve this.

A question about your redirects. But first, thanks for the info on BD.

my site: chrisheath.us shows the same with or without the ‘www’

I tried adding a .htaccess file with the line: redirect 301 http://www.chrisheath.us http://chrisheath.us

that didn’t seem to work.

I’m on a virtual server (vps) and run apache. Any ideas? Or is there a redirect already going on since you get the same page for both?

TYIA,
Chris Heath

The rise in referral traffic from Google seems to have stabilized, so I’ve re-run the analysis from last week and updated the big daddy status list to reflect the current status of the various datacentres; two of which appear to have switched ove…

Part of Bigdaddy appears to be a change in the way that some redirects are handled, so there are certainly algorithm changes as well as infrastructure changes in the new datacentre setup.

There are other things to consider – I installed google analytics last year, so google now has a far better understanding of how visitors to this site behave, what they click on, etc, so that might have helped. If insight from the first analytics customers is part of the Bigdaddy rollout then it would help to explain the increase in readership. Also, when the Jagger update occurred, google derived traffic did drop slightly, so this might be redressing the balance from that.

Of course, all I can do is observe and speculate.