Move to a new domain - How to get the redirects right?

[mrlolalot]

Hi,

I hope that someone with good htaccess knowledge can help.

I am planning on moving my site to a new domain. I understand that I should make 301 redirects using htaccess for every URL. This is a big site so it will be impossible to not forget some of the thousands existing URLs.

Now to the question: How do I make all the URLs that is not specified in htaccess to redirect to my new root?

Thanks!

[mrlolalot]

Oops, I forgot to update this question after I came to a conclusion. Thanks for answering!

The redirects I ended up with looks like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^old-product.html$ http://www.new-domain.com/new-product.html [R=301] 
RewriteRule ^old-category$ http://www.new-domain.se/new-category [R=301]

I tried first to write them the way you suggest but it didn't work the way I wanted it do for category pages (or folders).

And I generated an .xml sitemap for the old site first that I used as a list of all URLs to redirect to so I think I covered them all.

[willcritchlow]

You don't actually want to do what you're asking - that would mean that no page on your site would 404 (if any missing page redirected to the root).

Better:

Redirect individual pages using:

RedirectPermanent oldpage.html newpage.html

Redirect sections using RedirectMatch or RewriteRule. Then set up a way of tracking 404 errors - either by checking your log files or by doing something like this to track them in google analytics:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2006/09/tip-tracking-404-pages.html

Then, when you have a list of pages you missed or forgot, you can add redirections for those pages as well.

I hope that makes sense.

[mrlolalot]

**** deleted