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There seem to be plenty of help articles that talk about ways you can set the default web page for a domain using .htaccess. Most of these articles assume that you are hosting a single domain on a single host. What I am going to tell you is how to do the same thing when you are hosting multiple parked domains on the same host and need one domain to point to a different default page than the others.

We will be using the .htaccess file for this purpose. If you don’t know where to find it, look in your public_html (“root”) html folder. If the file doesn’t exist, you’ll need to create it using plain text and name it .htaccess

In this .htaccess file you may already have a setting that looks similar to this:
DirectoryIndex index.php default.php

This setting controls the pages that your parked domains will all look for by default. For example, when visiting https://www.mypctechs.com, if the above setting was in my .htaccess file, the server would deliver index.php first and default.php if that didn’t exist.

Because you are trying to get a parked domain to visit a different page than the two shown above, you’ll need to add some additional commands in your .htaccess file ABOVE the DirectoryIndex page. Otherwise the server will process the DirectoryIndex directive and your commands later in the file will never be executed.

Start at the top of your .htaccess file and add the following lines:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?thenameofyourdomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(/)?$ newdefaultpage.php [L]

Change thenameofyourdomain to the domain that you’d like to set a new default page for. Change newdefaultpage.php to the name of the page that you’d like as default.

Doing this will preserve your standard default.php and index.php for all other domains, while giving your new domain a different default landing page. Upload your new .htaccess file to the server and enjoy!

NOTE: Be very careful when editing your .htaccess file and always make a backup copy of the file before you change it. If you notice any problems with your site after the changes you can always revert back.

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We now have another tool in the shed for tracking the effectiveness of social media marketing campaigns. Google has a new search page, Google Realtime, that allows a search of social updates, news articles and blog posts about hot topics around the world.

This tool gives you an easy way to find hot companies offering products and services on the social web. This beta project could very well be a testing ground for something much bigger down the road. Google has tried several times to integrate real time social web search results into standard Google searches, but nothing much has come of those efforts. If this tool takes off, I believe the research they gain from the project will lead to bigger things down the road. Specifically, the merging of standard web search results with results from Facebook, Twitter, news sites, and other social networking sites.

One other lesson that this experiment can teach us is the importance of a deep online marketing approach for your business that doesn’t focus solely on pay per click advertising to get the word out. In addition to SEM, proper SEO and social media marketing methods continue to gain ground as cost-effective ways to put products and services in front of prospective clients.

Get searching now and see if your company rates well in realtime.

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