Redirect Help - Domain Change and Website Redesign

[timscullin]

Hi there,

I've redesigned a website for a client, but we are also changing domains and I'm trying to figure out the best way to set up the redirects from their old domain to the new one.

95% of their search engine traffic originally came through brand related keywords that landed on their homepage, and most of the remaining 15% landed on 3 other pages.

The new site has pages to replace these 3 main SEO pages, and I'm about to set 301 redirects from their old domain, but I can't figure out the quickest/best way to do it.

Is it possible to set up a specific redirect for the 4 main pages (Home + plus the 3 others) then a "catch all" type of thing for the rest of the pages, that redirect either to the homepage, or some sort of "Check out our new Site" landing page.

How do you do this, or is there a better way to set it up?

Thanks!

[evolvingSEO]

Tim

The essential pages to redirect are;

• Ones that have backlinks pointing to them (check in opensite explorer, majestic seo, google webmaster tools, and analytics for referring sites
• Carry ranking value for specific keywords that are valuable to you
• Have ever been a landing page (look at your landing page report in analytics for the past 6-12 months) - although it seems like you've got this figured out. Is it a fairly small site?  (Under 50 pages or something?)

Depending on how your site is built there are several options for doing the redirects in an efficient way.  Assuming it's a custom site and you've got a good clean URL structure, I might try something like;

1. Spider both sites with Screaming Frog
2. Export the URLs into Excel
3. Do some sort of lookup function to match the corresponding URLs from the old site to the new site
4. Use that to construct the text for the .htaccess file.

If the site is so small, you might not need something intense like that.  Cut and paste will do just fine  If some other setup, I'd need to know more to suggest a different way to create your redirects.

After you do everything, check webmaster tools for the next few weeks for any 404s that might pop up.

Hope that helps.

-Dan

[JaspalX]

Hi Tim, if you haven't already, check out http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection which gives you some basics and then there are some good links in the answers to this question http://www.seomoz.org/q/htaccess-issue which explain how to get redirects working.

The other thing to consider is: were any of the old pages actually getting traffic? If not, it may not be worth your while to redirect them.

If you've only got three pages, just use something like:

redirect 301 /blah.htm http://www.newdomain/newblah.php

and so on.