I got a link from ZOHO telling me they wanted me to remove my links to them – No – this is the WWW – note the 3rd W

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Google had informed them “recently received a notification from Google stating that our website has unnatural links pointing towards [zoho]. This has really damaged our Keyword rankings on Google …” and to remove the links. It was my recent article on a topic about them and some links to them that solved – what should be quite simple but it is QUITE HARD actually and I had been victorious.

Here is an article to help with a redirect that made me clear up Google crawling errors.

What? No – I am not going to remove any links! This is a website is all about STORING LINKS for myself and others reading this. These articles are my new bookmarks. Basically I was being asked to turn the WWW into plain WW? I don’t think so. What’s next – lower page rankings because I spell colour with a u?

What it is is that I had recently removed “www.elbsolutions.com/elbsolutions/” in favour of “www.elbsolutions.com/projects” and I forgot to change my sitemap which had a whole bunch of old links. When I logged in using my webmaster tools – I saw this yellow ! beside this. So – what else could I do to fix this – I know … .htaccess. Here is a good .htaccess file to redirect all my links from the sub-directory to the new sub-directory. Note the ? at the end. Anything after elbsolutions … will get put AFTER the ? on the new site – which means it will ALWAYS work and stop the 401’s that Google complains about – and other people.

[bash]

#Top of .htaccess file
Redirect 301 /elbsolutions http://www.elbsolutions.com/projects/index.php?
Redirect 301 /elbsolutions/ http://www.elbsolutions.com/projects/index.php?
Redirect 301 /elbsolutions/(.*) http://www.elbsolutions.com/projects/index.php?

[/bash]

They were quite serious after I sent a reply that perhaps they should read the post which brags about their “almost ready” online database program called ZOHO Creator. It is going to be quite something. They said they read it and yes, they wanted the links removed despite my common sense that the WWW is for linking and helping eachother (yes you – the reader). After telling them i was an active developer and part of paying customer (my client) – they then replied and were sorry for the inconvenience. What it is is that I was pulling their ranking down and was marked as a delinquent Google site. The problem is hopefully fixed. If not, well, I will update this article.