Can someone take a peek and tell me whats wrong with sfnt not working right

[wsmike]

This is probably something simple and I didn't want to bug the overworked tech people, but we recently upgraded 2 websites to Ready Themes, and if you type in the domain and /sfnt.html it should take you to the home page, but on one of the sites it goes to the page not found page. I'm just not sure where to look to fix this. The site was getting 20 orders a day until I put the ready theme in and now its getting almost nothing. Do I need to do something to my htaccess page?

The site is armynavyshop.com Here is a copy of the present htaccess page:
I'm not sure what most of the stuff in it is or if it is hurting the site - if there are any htaccess guys out there, I sure would appreciate some advice. I'm not sure if something needs to be changed, but I know something ain't right when I type into the address bar http://armynavyshop.com/sfnt.html and it comes up not found....

#Gzip
<ifmodule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript
</ifmodule>
#End Gzip


<filesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$" >
Header set Expires "access plus 6 months"
</filesMatch>


DirectoryIndex index.html
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.armynavyshop.com/mm5/merc...vc?Screen=NTFD


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{http_host} !^www\.armynavyshop\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.armynavyshop.com/$1 [R=301,L]




RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com [R=301,L]


RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.htm
RewriteRule ^index\.htm$ http://www.armynavyshop.com [R=301,L]


RewriteRule ^prods/rc10451.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com/index.html [R=410,L]
RewriteRule ^mm5/$ http://www.armynavyshop.com [R=301,L]


RewriteRule ^09-camping-surival-hunting.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com/category...l-Hunting.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^01-clothing-army-navy.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com/category...-clothing.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^clothing.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com/category...-clothing.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^Clothing.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com/category...-clothing.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^03-footwear-army-navy.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com/category...ary-Boots.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^bdu-pants.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com/category/BDU-Pants.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^clearance.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com/category/army-surplus.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^Clearance.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com/category/army-surplus.html [R=301,L]






RewriteRule ^Merchant2(.*) http://www.armynavyshop.com/mm5/$1 [R=301,L]


RewriteRule index.htm$ http://www.armynavyshop.com//index.html [R=301,L]




RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+).html$ /category/$1.html [QSA,L]




### Begin - Inserted by Miva Merchant


DirectoryIndex /mm5/merchant.mvc


RewriteEngine On


RewriteRule ^mm5/admin.mvc? - [QSA,L]


RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s
RewriteRule ^prods/([^/.]+).html$ /mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_code=$1 [QSA,L]


RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s
RewriteRule ^category/([^/.]+).html$ /mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_code=$1 [QSA,L]


RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/.]+).html$ /mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Category_code=$1&Product_ code=$2 [QSA,L]


RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+).html$ /mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=$1 [QSA,L]


### End - Inserted by Miva Merchant

[Pamela Hazelton]

Re: Can someone take a peek and tell me whats wrong with sfnt not working right

I don't see any reference to sfnt here. Do your other supporting pages work as (lowercase-code).html?

Easiest fix is to just put a 301 redirect line that loads the domain itself.

[wsmike]

Re: Can someone take a peek and tell me whats wrong with sfnt not working right

Pamela,
Thank you for answering. I'm not programmer and don't really understand the language in the htaccess file, but I did copy this:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com [R=301,L]

and inserted it with the change from index to sfnt in the 2 lines I inserted, because the old site used the index.html page as the home page.

That seemed to work, but I wonder what is the ^[A-Z]{3,9} ? Does that somehow limit something.
I'm not sure if your forte' is htaccess files or not, but here is my situation. I had a guy who was a BS'er and he really didn't know much at all and I'm afraid there may be stuff in the file that may be bad for us. It's just a gut feeling because the site always did around 20 orders a day and now it suddenly went down to about 4 or 5. I had to lay off everyone but my wife and we may have to go belly up after all these years. I simply want an opinion from someone who can just look at our htaccess file and give me their opinion.... we're not in any trouble with Google. I check webmaster tools all the time. Maybe I'm just grasping at straws right now, but it seems strange that we convert our miva store to ready themes and suddenly we lose three quarters of our sales. At this point we're too broke to pay more 'experts' so this forum, I hope and pray will be our answer. I know there are good people out there that could guide me in the right direction. Again, thank you for answering my post. The 301 redirect seemed to at least get the page to load instead of the not found page.

[Pamela Hazelton]

Re: Can someone take a peek and tell me whats wrong with sfnt not working right

Have you considered letting Miva Merchant handle this for you? Take a look at the SEO friendly urls (shortlinks) feature, which would actually set the URLs for all the pages the way you want. Note that you should first copy and backup the existing .htaccess rewrite code first to make sure that the shortlinks work perfectly.

[wsmike]

Re: Can someone take a peek and tell me whats wrong with sfnt not working right

Pamela,
But changing the links to shortlinks, if they are not already shorlinks (I'm not sure), ---wouldn't that wipe out any link juice from all the years we ae online. and I guess I'd need to redirect all the pages that are not shortlinks?

[Pamela Hazelton]

Re: Can someone take a peek and tell me whats wrong with sfnt not working right

No. If the URL structure itself doesn't change, it won't affect anything.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: Can someone take a peek and tell me whats wrong with sfnt not working right

Pamela,
Thank you for answering. I'm not programmer and don't really understand the language in the htaccess file, but I did copy this:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com [R=301,L]

and inserted it with the change from index to sfnt in the 2 lines I inserted, because the old site used the index.html page as the home page.

That seemed to work, but I wonder what is the ^[A-Z]{3,9} ? Does that somehow limit something.

Those two statements above are fairly odd. THE_REQUEST is a special Apache web server variable that includes all of the request from the visitor, including the type of request, so it would normally be set to something like:

GET /index.html HTTP/1.1

The ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html portion tells the web server that the condition has to match the following pattern:

1) The ^ means match from the beginning
2) The [A-Z] is a range of all capital letters, so the pattern to match is only capital letters.
3) The {3,9} means match between three and nine characters.

If I had to guess, the purpose of the rewrite was to strip off /index.html from the end of a home page request and just leave the domain sitting there. The same thing could be done with much less overhead by simply:

Redirect 301 /index.html http://www.armynavyshop.com/?



Some comments about the below in-line:

<filesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$" >
Header set Expires "access plus 6 months"
</filesMatch>

I'm not a fan of the above. You're telling visitors to cache your images, javascript and CSS for six months. This means when you update those, people who have previously visited your site may not see the changes for months unless you rename the files and then update all references to them. A much smaller better should provide nearly the same benefit and still let you change things without a huge delay.

DirectoryIndex index.html
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.armynavyshop.com/mm5/merc...vc?Screen=NTFD

You've got the directory index set to index.html here and the store further down. The correct one should be chosen and the other eliminated.

The second line is an issue as well. The 404 page should never be set to a full URL (that starts with http://....) When you do that, you cause the server to issue a status code 200 for the error page, which tells search engines that whatever they request actually was valid, but the content has changed to that of your 404 page. It should just be:

ErrorDocument 404 /NTFD.html if you're using short links for example. Preferably though, set it to a static page that exists. Having 404's handled by the store is a bad thing when someone comes along probing your website for vulnerabilities as it can trigger thousands of store requests, generating load, consuming inventory (if you use it), etc.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{http_host} !^www\.armynavyshop\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.armynavyshop.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This is forcing requests to always include the www

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.htm
RewriteRule ^index\.htm$ http://www.armynavyshop.com [R=301,L]

Strips both index.html and index.htm off.

RewriteRule ^prods/rc10451.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com/index.html [R=410,L]

This one doesn't make sense. It's sending requests to that product page to a 'gone' (status code 410) page, which is your site /index.html which your other rewrites attempt to eliminate the use of. It should be eliminated and just let it be a normal 404, or redirect it to somewhere relevant.

RewriteRule ^mm5/$ http://www.armynavyshop.com [R=301,L]


RewriteRule ^09-camping-surival-hunting.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com/category...l-Hunting.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^01-clothing-army-navy.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com/category...-clothing.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^clothing.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com/category...-clothing.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^Clothing.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com/category...-clothing.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^03-footwear-army-navy.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com/category...ary-Boots.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^bdu-pants.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com/category/BDU-Pants.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^clearance.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com/category/army-surplus.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^Clearance.html$ http://www.armynavyshop.com/category/army-surplus.html [R=301,L]

RewriteRule ^Merchant2(.*) http://www.armynavyshop.com/mm5/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule index.htm$ http://www.armynavyshop.com//index.html [R=301,L]

Bunch of redirects

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+).html$ /category/$1.html [QSA,L]

This takes "anything but a forward slash, that ends in a .html" and treats it as a category; this may be why your sfnt was not working, since it would have been intercepted and treated as a category request.