How to compress a symbolic link?

Take care of placing the "h" option in the correct place. In your example:

tar -cjvf archive.tar.bz2 mainwebsite_html

should be

tar -chjvf archive.tar.bz2 mainwebsite_html

From the tar(1) man page:

  -h, --dereference
          follow symlinks; archive and dump the files they point to

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