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We switched servers about a year ago. Clearly an IP used by someone else previously was allocated and although they seem to have *mostly* got their site traffic pointing at their new IP it does seem that some of it is still routing to our IP address.
About 10% of the traffic to our homepage is actually people looking for the other url.
Tried contacting them but they either don't understand the issue (it's a restaurant) or it's not important to them (which is odd). Also emailed who I think is their whois holder but got no reply there either (I've done an IP lookup on 'our' IP and it's definitely held against the other url).
Is there anyway we can 'bounce' traffic like this? As far as google analytics is concerned we can ignore it but I'd like people not to see our hompeage if they arrive from this other url.
Why would you want to bounce the traffic? All traffic is good traffic! Its like saying you want to divert all people who walk past a shop front away to another street unless they are looking for you specifically?
mod_rewrite the URL and redirect it to the new IP. Or goatse, lemonparty, 2girls1cup, meatspin etc.
[i]All traffic is good traffic! [/i]
I'm not sure people looking for a Restaurant in a small Scottish town are going to also be in the market for a vertical market software application is there any specific reason to allow it to confinue?
It looks a bit odd on google when a search for them returns our homepage as the top result, too.
torsoinalake, clearly someone who as been at the IT coal face for to long.
but mod_rewrite or a vhost with a 302 would work, mod re-write being the cleaner way
assuming one was operating in a windows environment with IIS what would the equivalent be?
It's called URL rewrite on IIS.
http://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/url-rewrite
EDIT: Beaten to it.
I'm not sure I follow from your post, are you saying that the DNS is wrong?
Alternatively you could setup a dummy 404 page or similar as a new website and use a hostheader to direct traffic there.
yes, their dns (or at least some part of it) is pointing at our IP.
[update]
Maybe someone's been playing - if I type their url directly into a browser it resolves to their site. If I google search and then click a link I get a 404 from my dns provider (Virgin media).
very odd.
dns record changes can take up 48 hours to propagate to all the dns servers
What's the difference between the two URLs (googled and direct)?
google has the www. on the front - I didn't type that. If I put www. on the front direct it fails too.
www is not the same address. You could have example.com and www.example.com going to seperate websites if you wanted.
I'm not sure I understand the initial problem though.
They might be sending traffic to your IP, but they would only ever get to your website if your website was setup to accept it. So someone types in the address, it goes to your server, and your server (IIS) checks to see what it's meant to do with that address.
Unless these people have access to your server I don't see how it can happen.
I'm not a server administrator (or meant to be anyway...) so maybe there are loopholes I don't understand.
They might be sending traffic to your IP, but they would only ever get to your website if your website was setup to accept it. So someone types in the address, it goes to your server, and your server (IIS) checks to see what it's meant to do with that address.
Default IIS single site accepts all traffic unless you start playng wiht hostheaders
I've 'favourited' this thread.
in case I ever have insomnia.
It ends up going to the default site (as setup in IIS) on our server which is our home page, not theirs.
I suspect then that the issue was that one or other of the www. and 'notwww. urls pointed at our Ip and one didn't - maybe they're in the process of changign it.
Yeah, that makes sense.
So have these guys got a working website then? It may well be that they've pointed one domain (for example www) and not bothered with the non-www (an easy mistake to make for a relative newbie).
yes, their 'proper' site looks quite good actually.
I sent a tweet at the designer a couple of days ago but didn't get a reply from them either.
Tweets may well be going to some clueless marketing guy. If you can find any contact details for the company I'd pop them an email and explain what's happening.
they deliberatly don't give an email address so people don;t send them bookings via email.
tweet was to some bloke who claims to be a social media guru and was sending 'real life' tweets, not just 'isn't our starter today great' type stuff.
you still with us brakes?
I'd go with mossimus' suggestion then. In IIS, set the default site as a 404 page. And create a new one for your site which uses host headers and thus asks what URL is requesting access. You get to list them explicity.
Restaurant customrs get a random 404 that is in no way linked to your site.
If you configure logging on your IIS server to include cs-host, you will be able to see which is the errant URL from your IIS logs. It's not there by default.
If you don't know what it is already, of course.
You've notified them, they've not done anything.
Beyond that I reckon I'd ignore them, personally. Buggerall to do with you in the grand scheme of things, it's their loss.
I'd go with a random re-direct based on the suggestions from torsoinalake above 🙂
I guess we could be nice and just redirect to the proper site.
thanks for all the suggestions and pleased to see that at least one of the moderators is still talking to me 😳