Yahoo! Stores finally offer 301 redirect.

[Nacho]

I just got this message in our Store Manager:

We recently introduced features that provide more control over customer interaction with your store. The Page Not Found Error Handling feature allows you to create and serve custom 404 error pages. The Yahoo! Domain Redirect feature enables you to redirect traffic permanently from Yahoo! Store URLs to your preferred domain.

I've been wanting to see this for a long time . . . THANKS for listening Yahoo!

[Nacho]

OK, I tried it and I got this response:

You have selected to redirect all Yahoo! Store generated URLs to www.domain.com.

All URLs starting with...

• store.yahoo.com
• store.yahoo.net
• site.yahoo.com
• site.yahoo.net
• stores.yahoo.com
• your account name pre-appended to any of the above URLs
• shop.store.yahoo.com or shop.stores.yahoo.com

...will be permanently redirected to:www.domain.com

The only problem is I have about 13 other domain names under my "Domain Names" manager that are also indexed by Yahoo! also need to be redirected to www.domain.com.

I guess it got fixed only half way . . . . Need your help Yahoo! please.

[Nacho]

OK, just in case it happens to any of you (kids don't try this at home ), here is what we did for our other domains. Keep in mind we're talking about a Yahoo! Store, not a regular site you can manage easily with your server and hosting company.

We set up a dedicated hosting account outside of Yahoo! because Yahoo! Webhosting would only allow one domain per account. We set up the server assigining an individual zone record for each domain as if it was their own site, here is an example:

zone "domain.com" {
type master;
file "/etc/namedb/primary/domain.com.db";
allow-transfer {imatest;};
notify yes;
};

Then uploaded the .htaccess file to the root directory of each domain via FTP with the 301 redirects like so:

redirect 301 / http://www.domain.com/

redirect 301 /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html

repeat for every file . . .

Then our robots.txt file so that the spiders send read to not index/follow 301, here is how:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Then you go to your registrar and change DNS primary and secondary to your new server. This usually looks something like this:

NS1.hositngcompany.COM
NS2.hositngcompany.COM

Then you wait for DNS to roll over and verify that spiders have done their work. If they haven't check for errors. For example, go type in one of your domains in the search box additional to the page title, spot the link and click on it. It should follow to the right location of the new domain. If it isn't go back and check everything one more time.

Finally, go back to the Store Manager and under Site Settings (all the way to the right), look for "Domain Names" and start deleting every additional domain you did a 301 redirect for. MAKE SURE YOU DON'T DELETE YOUR MAIN DOMAIN NAME (the one you did not do a 301 for).

If the search engines have not done their work to respect the 301 redirects and robots.txt file, then just pray every night you don't get penalized for content duplication.

Good luck to you!

Saludos!

PS. Shame on you Y! Slurp for indexing through the back door via Y! Stores