Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Any way around buying hosting for an old domain to 301 redirect to a new domain?
-
Howdy.
I have just read this QA thread, so I think I have my answer. But I'm going to ask anyway!
Basically DomainA.com is being retired, and DomainB.com is going to be launched.
We're going to have to redirect numerous URLs from DomainA.com to DomainB.com. I think the way to go about this is to continue paying for hosting for DomainA.com, serving a .htaccess from that hosting account, and then hosting DomainB.com separately.
Anybody know of a way to avoid paying for hosting a .htaccess file on DomainA.com?
Thanks!
-
If I am understanding correctly you want people to access DomainA.com when they go to DomainB.com? If this is the case, you could set up DomainB.com as a Domain Forward to DomainA.com.
For instance a Client I have right now has www.drcharlescrane.com and www.drcharlescrane.net. Hosting is only set up for .com and we domain forward .net.
You can also have this set up as a domain forwarding with mask so if you wanted the user would actually see in the URL domainb.com but pulling domaina.com's content.
I hope this makes sense and if you need further clarification let me know. Also where is your domain registered. I use Godaddy primarily to the low costs for domains. Here is a how to domain forward provided by them and more information on the topic - http://help.godaddy.com/article/422
-
DNS, resolves a name to a ip number,
that ip number should route to your website. Inthe headers of the resquest is the domain name, your web site should be configured to accept either all requests on a ip number and port or filtered by host headers (domains names), add all teh host headers needed, then in htaccess 30 to the pirmary domain name.
-
Thank you Alan. Are you suggesting that via DNS records I have DomainA.com "live" in the same place as DomainB.com, and then host the .htaccess on DomainB.com's hosting space?
So somebody requests DomainA.com, the DNS points to the hosting for DomainB.com, and then the .htaccess for DomainB.com can process the original DomainA.com request?
-
Thanks, but does this help with 301s for inner pages?
-
I had just the same experience. It was only one occasion but I did nothing more to the site then putting it under a new account on my shared hosting, so only the last digit of the ip has changed. I saw a drop in rankings however the original I gained back the original rankings a few weeks later.
-
I cant say it does, but when I changed ips i had a drop in rankings. But i cant prove it was the change in ip
but there is some logic to it,
A domain name is resolved to a ip address to find the website, the domain name is sent in the header. Your web site accepts a connection on a socket, ip number and port 123.123.123.123:80, it then looks in the header for the domain name
so a SE will see a difference, it will know this is not the same address -
100% disagree.
Most of the biggest websites in the world use DNS load balancing which will change the IP address of the server every request.
301 redirects lose a small amount of juice but IP changes don't.
Hosting changes don't (assuming no errors or outages).
Who-is changes do, but that is not relevant here.
-
1. you need to make a change to your DNS settings.
where every you registered your domain, you ned to change your Arecord to point at the correct ip number
2. you need to do a 301 redirect to primary domain.
-
If you have Cpanel here are the instructions. For godaddy or plesk call your host and tell them what you are trying to do.
Log into where you purchased domain A and forward it to the name servers at B's hosting. Then go into B Cpanel and click on add on domains. Add your domain. Once the domain has been added go to domain redirects and redirect your old domain to new.
For type choose permanent 301
Choose the domain you want to redirect from the drop down. Next manually type in your new domain name where it says "redirects to".
-
I think I disagree as moving site A's hosting to a new ip causes a drop in rankings.
Never heard about this before. I think this is not true, i have chagned IP's in the past without any consequences.
-
You shouldn't have to continue to pay for hosting for the site you are getting rid of, just keep renewing the domain name and then 301 it to the new site and you should be fine.
-
Thank you. I'm actually not understanding. How do I Park A on B. What is "explicit .htaccess"?
-
There is no penalty or loss for changing an IP address. There are many legitimat reasons for doing that. IP changes often occr when your host moves your site to a different server, or, when you upgrade your hosting package, or move to a different hosting service. No worries at all about new IPs.
-
The .htaccess that have the information about the A domain is inside B hosting, so, you don't need anymore A hosting when you do all the redirections.
I think this post can help:
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067216/The-10-Step-Site-Migration-Process
bye
-
Egol has usually got great answers that woths linstening to, this time however I think I disagree as moving site A's hosting to a new ip causes a drop in rankings. Put the redirection on top of that and you get some more fallback. I think in the above case I would not change the hosting but do the redirect and wait for google to notice the change. Maybe a few months later I would give up site A's original hosting and migrate it to site B's hosting to be able to keep the original urls live for some more time.
-
Park A on B and redirect with explicit .htaccess.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What to do with old content after 301 redirect
I'm going through all our blog and FAQ pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones are competing with one another. Basically doing an SEO content clean up. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the page published vs trashing it after you apply a 301 redirect to a better performing page?
Technical SEO | | LindsayE0 -
1000 Pages on old website. What to do with the 301 redirects for this domain?
Hi Moz Community, I have a 301 redirect question... I just acquired an old domain: Totally in my niche Domain is 14 years old Website exists of 1000 pages Great amount of backlinks Website is offline since about 2 weeks Will place a new website online asap with new url structure For the 50 best scoring pages I wrote a new, but fully comparable/related article. I will put a 301 redirect from those old to the new pages. My question: What to do with the 950 other url's? Should I put a 301 redirect to the homepage? Should I forward those pages to the 404 page? Should I divide the 950 url's with a 301 redirect to the 50 new ones? Another solution maybe? Any idea what would be the best solution so we can save as much Google juice as possible? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | snorkel0 -
Redirecting old Sitemaps to a new XML
I've discovered a ton of 404s from Google's WMT crawler looking for mydomain.com/sitemap_archive_MONTH_YEAR. There are tons of these monthly archive xmls. I've used a plugin that for some reason created individual monthly archive xml sitemaps and now I get 404s. Creating rules for each archive seems a bad solution. My current sitemap plugin creates a single clean one mydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml. How can I create a redirect rule in the Redirection WP plugin that will redirect any URL that has the 'sitemap' and 'xml' string in it to my current xml sitemap? I've tried using a wildcard like so: mysite.com/sitemap*.*, mysite.com/sitemap ., mysite.com/sitemap(.), mysite.com/sitemap (.) but none of the wildcard uses got the general redirect to work. Is there a way to make this happen with the WP Redirection plugin? If not, is there a htaccess rule, and what would the code be for it? Im not very fluent with using general redirects in htaccess unfortunately. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | IgorMateski0 -
Best & easiest way to 301 redirect on IIS
Hi all, What is the best and easiest way to 301 redirect URLs on IIS server? I got access to the FTP and WordPress back office, but no access to the server admin. Is there an easy way to create 301 redirect without having to always annoy the tech in charge of the server? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | 2MSens0 -
301 Redirect with index.asp
I am very new to all of this so forgive the newbie questions I will get better. Ok so after starting a campaign I see that I have many issues including where some pages are being deemed as duplicate content. 1. The report says the http://lucid8.com has duplicate content on 2 other pages 2. When I look at them it shows that http://lucid8.com/index.asp and http://www.lucid8.com are duplicates. 3. Really these are the exactly the same page because the default page that is opened for www.lucid8.com http://www.lucid8.com etc always opens the index.asp page. 4. Now I read that I should do permanent redirects and how to do this via IIS and I tried to do a redirect from index.asp to www.lucid8.com but that does not work because www.lucid8.com is pointing to index.asp and so we end up in a circle. So the question is how do I get rid of these duplicate page references without causing problems. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TroyW0 -
What should be use 301 or 302 redirection for 404 pages
Please suggest which redirection we should use for 404 pages- 301 or 302. If you can elaborate it with reason then it will be highly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | koamit0 -
Does it really matter to maintain 301 redirect after de-indexing of old URLs?
Today, I was reading latest blog post on SEOmoz blog about. Uncrawled 301s - A Quick Fix for When Relaunches Go Too Well This is very interesting study about 301 & How it useful to maintain traffic. I'm working on eCommerce website and I have done similar stuff on my website. I have big confusion to manage 301 redirect. My website generates new URLs due to following actions. Re-write dynamic URLs. Re-launch entire website on different eCommerce platform. [osCommerce to Magento Commerce] Re-name category. Trasfer one product from one category to another category. I'm managing my 301 redirect with old practice. Excel sheet data from Google webmaster tools and set specific new URLs for redirect. Hoooo... Now, I have 8.5K redirect in htaccess... And, I'm thinking it's too much. Can we remove old 301 redirect from htaccess or not? This is big question for me. Because, all pages are not hyperlink on external website. Google have just de-indexed old URLs and indexed new URLs. So, Is it require to maintain 301 redirect after Google process?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
302 or 301 redirect to https ?
I am redirecting whole site to https. Is there a difference between 302 or 301 redirect for seo? Site never been indexed. Planning to do that with .htaccess command RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
Technical SEO | | Kotkov
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L] There are plenty of ways http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/ssl-example-usage-in-htaccess.html Which way would be the best? Thanks is advance0
