To remove the HTML body of nginx 301 302 redirects
When Nginx returns a 301 or a 302 redirect, it also returns a small useless HTML body.
<html>
<head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head>
<body>
<center><h1>301 Moved Permanently</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx</center>
</body>
</html>
You can see this body when you perform a "curl talk.plesk.com" for instance. However today, many major domains don't return a HTML body, it is the case of facebook.com, twitter.com, youtube.com and www.plesk.com .
Funny enough, when i do a "curl www.plesk.com" it returns no html body. It means that someone at plesk remove this html body. But in plesk onyx it will always return the default html body that I have mentionned before. However, talk.plesk.com still returns the nginx html body.
It helps to save a bit of bytes for those who have a lot of redirects.
From a SEO point of view, I had an issue related to the HTML body of 301 nginx redirect. Google saw it as a crawl anomaly and soft 404. It means that google thought that the HTML body returned by nginx was a real document (sic) and thought that my server was not properly configured.
So to achieve this, I already did it locally, in nginx additional directives for my http to https.
errorpage 301 302 @30x;
location @30x {
defaulttype ""; #will remove Content-Type completely
return 300; # 300 is a filler: client will get the original HTTP status code
}
if ($sslprotocol = "") {
rewrite ^ https://$servername$request_uri? permanent;
}
I guess it is possible to do it in server.conf.
Today, all bots and browsers rely on the HTTP header field "Location" only to find the destination URL of a 301 or a 302. This is what happens when a bot hits www.plesk.com which does not return a HTML BODY in a 301 redirect.
example:
jojo@DESKTOP-IRG1A6S:~$ curl http://www.plesk.com/ -I
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Fri, 02 Oct 2020 07:26:35 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=3600
Expires: Fri, 02 Oct 2020 08:26:35 GMT
Location: https://www.plesk.com/
cf-request-id: 0589cdb1650000085f85953200000001
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Server: cloudflare
CF-RAY: 5dbcb22f0ac2085f-CDG
Nicolas Guerinet
shared this idea
Thank you for your input. We will consider this functionality in upcoming releases if it is popular. Everyone, please continue voting for this feature if you consider it important.
—
IG