• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        4. Forwarded vanity domains, suddenly resolving to 404 with appended URL's ending in random 5 characters

        Moz Q&A is closed.

        After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

        Forwarded vanity domains, suddenly resolving to 404 with appended URL's ending in random 5 characters

        Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        2
        4
        1069
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • SS.Digital
          SS.Digital last edited by

          We have several vanity domains that forward to various pages on our primary domain.
          e.g. www.vanity.com (301)--> www.mydomain.com/sub-page (200)

          These forwards have been in place for months or even years and have worked fine.  As of yesterday, we have seen the following problem.  We have made no changes in the forwarding settings.

          Now, inconsistently, they sometimes resolve and sometimes they do not.  When we load the vanity URL with Chrome Dev Tools (Network Pane) open, it shows the following redirect chains, where xxxxx represents a random 5 character string of lower and upper case letters.  (e.g. VGuTD)

          EXAMPLE:
          www.vanity.com                                  (302, Found) -->
          www.vanity.com/xxxxx                        (302, Found) -->
          www.vanity.com/xxxxx                        (302, Found) -->
          www.vanity.com/xxxxx/xxxxx               (302, Found) -->
          www.mydomain.com/sub-page/xxxxx (404, Not Found)

          This is just one example, the amount of redirects, vary wildly.  Sometimes there is only 1 redirect, sometimes there are as many as 5.

          Sometimes the request will ultimately resolve on the correct mydomain.com/sub-page, but usually it does not (as in the example above).

          We have cross-checked across every browser, device, private/non-private, cookies cleared, on and off of our network etc...   This leads us to believe that it is not at the device or host level.

          Our Registrar is Godaddy.  They have not encountered this issue before, and have no idea what this 5 character string is from.  I tend to believe them because per our analytics, we have determined that this problem only started yesterday.

          Our primary question is, has anybody else encountered this problem either in the last couple days, or at any time in the past?  We have come up with a solution that works to alleviate the problem, but to implement it across hundreds of vanity domains will take us an inordinate amount of time.  Really hoping to fix the cause of the problem instead of just treating the symptom.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • SS.Digital
            SS.Digital @MikeTek last edited by

            Yes, we have contacted GoDaddy several times.

            GoDaddy has insisted it is not their problem and they do not have any advice to resolve this issue. GoDaddy support said there can be strange behavior when forward and masking. We tested removing the masking, but it did not make a difference. Nor does 301 vs. 302 redirecting. I understand the latter should not be used as a workaround as these responses have different meanings, but we did test (which also made no difference).

            Check this link for more details:

            https://www.godaddy.com/community/Managing-Domains/My-domain-name-not-resolving-correctly-6-random-characters-are/m-p/64440#M16148

            Others are experiencing the same issue and somewhere in the thread it was stated that GoDaddy recently rolled out a new system which likely created this issue. We can trace the issue beginning in late August 2017 via Google Analytics, Search Console 404s and testing via Chrome Dev Tools (Network pane with Preserve log checked).

            We would also like to understand why in order to address the root cause, instead of using a workaround. This is significant issue. Unfortunately, GoDaddy is not handling the issue professionally and will impact our future business decisions involving GoDaddy.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • MikeTek
              MikeTek last edited by

              That's a very strange behavior I have not seen before (and I've had plenty of experience with GoDaddy and their domain forwarding).

              The query workaround is interesting/clever - but I'd also be inclined to want to sort out why this is happening at all and stop it vs reworking all the domain forwards around this symptom.

              Have you contacted GoDaddy's shared hosting support? I'm not the biggest GoDaddy fan overall, but their tech support team can be quite helpful in tracking issues like this down.

              SS.Digital 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • SS.Digital
                SS.Digital last edited by

                It looks like this is a GoDaddy specific issue that many others are experiencing:

                https://www.godaddy.com/community/Managing-Domains/My-domain-name-not-resolving-correctly-6-random-characters-are/td-p/60782

                Although, at the time of this writing GoDaddy has not offered an explanation nor resolution. However, a workaround may be forwarding the domain with a query string appended, which in turn, appends the random six characters to the query string, instead of creating a url segment that the CMS interprets as a non-existent page and throws a 404.

                For example, consider:

                www.vanity.com -> www.primary.com?utm_source=forward

                The GoDaddy issue should then resolve with via:

                www.primary.com?utm_source=forwardxxxxxx

                Alternatively, the fowarding can be accomplished from the reverse angle, if you have access to the hosting account of the primary domain by adding a forwarded domain from something like cPanel or Plesk that points the primary domain name and then updating the GoDaddy A record to point to the primary domain's IP Address (and remove any GoDaddy forwarding).

                Or migrate from GoDaddy!

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Browse Questions

                Explore more categories

                • Moz Tools

                  Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                • SEO Tactics

                  Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                • Community

                  Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                • Digital Marketing

                  Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                • Research & Trends

                  Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                • Support

                  Connect on product support and feature requests.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • Daaveey

                  Should I redirect a domain we control but which has been labeled 'toxic' or just shut it down?

                  Hi Mozzers: We recently launched a site for a client which involved bringing in and redirecting content which formerly had been hosted on different domains. One of these domains still existed and we have yet to bring over the content from it. It has also been flagged as a suspicious/toxic backlink source to our new domain. Would I be wise to redirect this old domain or should I just shut it down? None of the pages seem to have particular equity as link sources. Part of me is asking myself 'Why would we redirect a domain deemed toxic, why not just shut it down.' Thanks in advance, dave

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey
                  0
                • McTaggart

                  Underscores, capitals, non ASCII characters in image URLs - does it matter?

                  I see this strangely formatted image URLs on websites time and again - is this an issue - I imagine it isn't best practice but does it make any difference to SEO? Thanks in advance, Luke

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
                  0
                • RosemaryB

                  Need a layman's definition/analogy of the difference between schema and structured data

                  I'm currently writing a blog post about schema.  However I want to set the record straight that schema is not exactly the same as structured data, although both are often used interchangeably.  I understand this schema.org is a vocabulary of global identifiers for properties and things.   Structured data is what Google officially stated as "a standard way to annotate your content so machines can understand it..." Does anybody know of a good analogy to compare the two? Thanks!

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
                  0
                • andyheath

                  Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google

                  I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath
                  0
                • kevinliao

                  What happens to a domain in SERPs when it's set to redirect to another?

                  We have just acquired a competing website and are wondering whether to leave it running as is for now, or set the domain to redirect to our own site. If we set up this redirect, what would happen to the old site in Google SERPs? Would the site drop off from results? If so, would we capture this new search traffic or is it a free for all and all sites compete for the search traffic as normal? Thanks in advance. Paul

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao
                  0
                • trung.ngo

                  Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index

                  I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed. My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index. Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trung.ngo
                  0
                • Bio-RadAbs

                  Can you redirect specific sub domain URLs?

                  ello! We host our PDFs, Images, CSS all in a sub domain. For the question, let's call this sub.cyto.com. I've noticed a particular PDF doing really well, infact it has gathered valuable external links from high authoritative sites. To top it off, it gets good visits. I've been going back and forth with our developers to move this PDF to a subfolder structure.
                  For example: www.cyto.com/document/xxxx.pdf In my perspective, if I move this and set up a permanent redirect, then all the external links the PDF gathered, link juice and future visits will be attributed to the main website. Since the PDF is existing in the subdomain, I can't even track direct visits nor get the link juice. It appears in top position of Google as well. My developer says it is better to keep images, pdf, css in the subdomain. I see his point and an idea I have is to: convert the pdf to a webpage. Set up a 301 redirect from the existing subdomain to this webpage Upload the pdf with a new name and link to it from the webpage, so users can download if they choose to. This should give me the existing rank juice. However, my question is whether you can set up a 301 redirect for just a single subdomain URL to a folder structure URL? sub.cyto.com/xxx.pdf to www.cyto.com/document/xxxx.pdf?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs
                  0
                • nicole.healthline

                  Is 404'ing a page enough to remove it from Google's index?

                  We set some pages to 404 status about 7 months ago, but they are still showing in Google's index (as 404's). Is there anything else I need to do to remove these?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.