Junk characters in URL when domain forwarding

Question

I'm facing this issue lately, I have forwarded my domain to one of the files which are hosted on my GoDaddy shared hosting. However, whenever I hit the domain name in the browser it leads to the respective file (.html ) along with the junk characters preceding.

Example:

www.domainname.info

Leads to:

https://www.mydomainname.in/coffee.html/NjSmZ/KiKgZ/

Result:

Error 404 page not found.

Haven't changed any code; it's a sudden behavior.

---

UPDATE (more info):

The NjSmZ/KiKgZ/ are the junk characters in the link. Forwarding is made through the GoDaddy domain forwarder itself. No external coding is done for forwarding.

www.Aitb.in is the domain which is been forwarded to advity.in/adarsha.html.

Answer 1

While I know not about how GoDaddy does its domain forwards internally, it does not seem to be a simple DNS CNAME as nothing shows on the current domain's lookup.

While playing around, looking at the forwarded domain's response I see it delivers a 301 (moved permanently) http response. The response replaces the chosen domain with the new one, and keeps the path part of the URL intact.

Considering domain.a is the forwarded domain and domain.b is the new domain, that means:

http://domain.a/ => http://domain.b/
http://domain.a/contact.html => http://domain.b/contact.html
http://domain.a/a/long/path/ => http://domain.b/a/long/path/

But in your case, you are forwarding to more than just a domain... domain.b is more like domain.b/coffee.html , following the same rule, this means:

http://domain.a/ => http://domain.b/coffee.html
http://domain.a/contact.html => http://domain.b/coffee.html/contact.html
http://domain.a/a/long/path/ => http://domain.b/coffee.html/a/long/path/

So, my suggestion here is, either use a better landing to url_rewrite the redirected paths to the correct one. Or, if you cannot you could try to add a ? or # at the end of your URL. This is pure speculation, but if the rewrite has no other hidden rules, this would give something like the following, which will make the appropriate request and "hide" the trash part.

http://domain.a/ => http://domain.b/coffee.html?
http://domain.a/contact.html => http://domain.b/coffee.html?/contact.html
http://domain.a/a/long/path/ => http://domain.b/coffee.html?/a/long/path/

Answer 2

The "junk characters" are certainly coming from GoDaddy and not from the original request. Domain Forwarding is just what GoDaddy calls their service that redirects web requests using a 301 or 302 redirect (or an iframe they call "masking"). The issue is - For whatever reason the GoDaddy web servers serving the redirects often append some "random" characters (as a subfolder) after the domain. In my experience the subfolder always appear directly after the domain, and before any path that may have been part of the original request. So, as Salketer says it is just a hack. But there is still an issue on GoDaddy's side'

Also, if you do use the hack and you use Google Analytics on your site, you may want to add something like ?x= rather than just ?. Then you can exclude the x parameter in Analytics and you won't end up with a hundred different URLs for you homepage.

Answer 3

I had this problem occur on several different domains controled by GoDaddy. I attempted several times to contact GoDaddy support to resolve the issue with no luck. Ultimately I decided to solve the problem myself because GoDaddy seems clueless to their problem.

Here is my solution: Add this PHP code to the top of your 404 error page. For WordPress, add this your theme's 404.php file:

<?php 
/* GoDaddy 404 Redirects FIX - by Daniel Chase - https://riseofweb.com */
$currURL = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$CheckRedirectError1 = substr($currURL, -6);
$CheckRedirectError2 = substr($currURL, 0, 7);
$CheckRedirectError = false;
if (preg_match("/^[a-zA-Z]{5}\/$/",$CheckRedirectError1)){
    $CheckRedirectError = $CheckRedirectError1;
}else if (preg_match("/^\/[a-zA-Z]{5}\/$/",$CheckRedirectError2)){
    $CheckRedirectError = substr($CheckRedirectError2, 1);
}
if($CheckRedirectError){
    $protocol = (!empty($_SERVER['HTTPS']) && $_SERVER['HTTPS'] !== 'off' || $_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] == 443) ? "https://" : "http://";
    $redirectTo = str_replace($CheckRedirectError, '', $currURL);
    header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
    header("Location: " . $protocol . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $redirectTo);
    exit();
}
?>

The script checks for the random characters and removes them, and then redirects to the proper page. You may need to add some exceptions or modify the script to fit your needs.

Answer 4

Thank you,

I ended up solving this issue by adding "?" at the end of the domain forwarding link

example: mydomain.com/main/foo.html? or example: mydomain.com/main/foo.html#