Traditionally redirecting a standard HTML page on a Windows server has been tricky especially if you don’t have access to the server config.

This may now have changed. I was watching an interview with one of the Google “Geeks”, and he was explaining that Search engines have agreed a new standard for redirects. (In addition to 301 which is still perfectly legitimate):

Here is a link to the interview if you are interested

The method is simple & involves adding a tag to the top of the page

link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/example.php”

where href = points to the page you want the search engine to index.

(note: This needs to be put in the normal opening & closing tags <......./> in the header of the document)

A couple of incidents recently have caused me to ask this question, and it’s is one you should be asking too. In many cases you may find that it is not be as secure as it needs to be.

In simple terms your on-line brand consists of 2 elements:

1. Your domain name
2. Your website

There are a few things you need to check with both of these elements:

Your Domain Name

This is arguably the most important factor as this IS your on-line brand. It is therefore essential that it is secure. To confirm that it is, you need to check that the domain registered to you. If it is not, get it changed NOW.

You can check this by doing a Whois lookup (here is a link to the one we use – www.dnsstuff.com) and check the Registrant Details. This should be your company. If it isn’t you need to get on to your domain supplier & ask them to change it.

Your Website

The big question here is “Are your website and any associated databases backed up regularly”.

Ask yourself the question:

“If I woke one morning to find my website was gone, or worse still had been hacked & replaced with someone else’s content, what would I do?”

If you have a back up the answer is simple – restore the back up and you are sorted. If its not, then the result could be an expensive rebuild from scratch!

You should check with your web provider that your site is backed up regularly and what they would do in the case of a “disaster”.

If you have any concerns that your web presence is not secure, feel free to contact us, and we will be happy to give you our input.