Yahoo! Small Business Web Hosting – A problem and a solution for a 301 redirect

The facts:

• Yahoo! hosts the RHFtech web site.
• I needed to change a link on over 200 pages from my old blog to the URL http://blog.rhftech.com.
• The standard way to make a global change is to add a redirect command in the .htaccess file on the root directory of the web site. This is commonly known as a 301 redirect.
• Yahoo! does not allow access to this file.

I searched the web for solutions. The findings: many others have been down this road before me. They are an unhappy lot because they have not found a good solution.

The choices they write about are:

• Manually change the link on every page
• Switch to a different web hosting company.

Neither is an appealing choice. Both involve long, tedious effort with potential for issues and errors.

I called Yahoo!’s customer support and was greeted by a polite woman who told me what I already knew. I explained that since both my choices were bad I would probably switch providers rather than manually change all those pages. I said, “I need a quick solution and not an explanation of why I can’t edit the .htaccess file or I will switch hosts.”

She put her supervisor on the phone. He had a solution if I used Dreamweaver. The application has a command, Site > Change Link Sitewide…, that fit the bill.

I use Dreamweaver, “phew”.

The method:

1. Open a page in Dreamweaver.
2. Click on the page whose link will be redirected to a different URL in the Files panel (Local Files).
3. Click on the menu Site > Change Link Sitewide… and follow the prompts.

Once this is completed, you need to FTP all the changed pages to the host. I used FileZilla to do this. The process took 15 minutes from start to finish. It is not as elegant as putting a 301 redirect in .htaccess but it is much better than changing a web host.

Yahoo!’s support supervisor solved this problem. Thanks.