CODEWITHSUNDEEP
apache.htaccessmod-rewritehttp-redirect
Martha Smithers
Martha Smithers

Reputation: 153

htaccess 301 redirect - how to disable it?

I have added 301 redirect on my website by mistake (because I was doing maintenance). Now lots of people can't get back to my website, because they are still redirected to other page - eventhough I removed redirection (even deleted htaccess). As much as I searched around it's because htaccess (or 301 redirect) is cached in users browser and I wasn't able to find any solution for this. Is there any way to fix this, I can't just loose hundreds of visitors because of something like this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 9486

Answers (1)

hrunting
hrunting

Reputation: 3947

This page explains what is going on in good detail:

Basically, modern browsers cache the redirect response for 301 for some indeterminate amount of time and will not make an updated request to your old web page to refresh it. Users can manually clear the cache and, because it is a cache, data can be purged if the browser needs more space for other data (like other redirects).

This SuperUser question resolves the caching issue from the client's end:

One interesting answer is:

In this answer, the user points out that the browser treats http://example.com/ and http://example.com/? as two different URLs. You could go to the "new" site and setup an HTTP 302 redirect pointing back to the original page with a ? on the end and it should load. If they original page already had a query as part of the URL, you can simple add an & to the end to achieve the same result.

It's not perfect -- it is a different URL after all -- but at least they'll be able to view your old site.

Note that your web application may try to redirect empty queries or invalid queries back to a "clean" page, which you may have to disable to get the intended result.

UPDATE
One other option is to put a redirect from the new site back to the old site (make this a 302 or 307 redirect to avoid the 301 problem you're currently having). From my testing, Chrome will remove the old redirect when it does this. It may throw a "redirect loop" error, but only once. I was unable to reproduce the cached redirect problem at all with the latest version of Firefox. Other browsers' behavior is probably going to be inconsistent.

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions