Setup 301 Redirects
-
I have been asked to transfer a clients old domain over to a new domain with a new site. All of the inbound links basically go to the homepage, and the few links that dont go to the homepage on the old site, might as well be redirected to the homepage on the new site.
I'm wondering is there a "catch all" sort of redirect such as www.oldsite.com/* redirects to newsite.com. So any redirects we havent set up will automatically go to the new site homepage?
And secondly, whats the easiest way to the redirects up?
Can I just add it as a parked domain or addon domain in cpanel, and do the redirects in there? Or does it needs its own hosting for the old domain with its own htaccess file?
Any help appreciated!
-
I guess as you mention .htaccess you are running apache - try this example: http://www.isitebuild.com/301-redirect.htm
If you are using cpanel I would add it as a parked domain - then follow the instructions in that link to do the redirect through .htaccess .
Parked domains on cpanel/whm don't redirect, so you will have a duplicate content problem if you miss out the .htaccess step. Remember to update as many incoming links as you can as well. Although the 301 will pass the rank on, it does keep a little to itself, so update your biggest incoming links to point to the new domain.
-
Yes there is a catch all. If you are using a Windows server try here. http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-domain-name-issues
I would not redirect deep links to home page, find a page relevant to the link text and linking page and redirect them there. Googe and Bing have said they dont like that sort of thing and may be discounted.
It does not need to be on its own hosting. just point both domains at the same website, then do the redirects.
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
-
Selective 301 redirections of pages within folders
Redirection Puzzle - it's got me puzzled anyhow! The finished website has just been converted from an old aspx affair to a wordpress site. Some directory structures have changed significantly; there appears to be a load of older medical articles that have not been added back in and it sounds unlikely that they will be. Therefore unmatched old news articles need to be pointed to the top news page to keep hold of any link value they may have accrued. The htaccess file starts with ithemes security's code, Followed by the main wordpress block and I have added the user redirects to the final section of the htaccess file . I have been through the redirects and rewrites line by line to verify them and the following sections are giving me problems. This is probably just my aging brain failing to grasp basic logic. If I can tap into anybody's wisdom for a bit of help I would appreciate it. My eyes and brain are gone to jelly. I have used htaccesscheck.com to check out the underlying syntax and ironed out the basic errors that I had previously missed. The bulk of the redirects are working correctly. #Here there are some very long media URLs which are absent on the new site and I am simply redirecting visiting spiders to the page that will hold media in future. Media items refuse to redirect
Technical SEO | | TomVolpe
Line 408 redirect 301 /Professionals/Biomedicalforum/Recordedfora/Rich%20Media%20http:/kplayer.kcl.ac.uk/ess/echo/presentation/15885525-ff02-4ab2-b0b9-9ba9d97ca266 http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/biomedical-forum/recorded-fora/ Line 409 redirect 301 /Professionals/Biomedicalforum/Recordedfora/Quicktime%20http:/kplayer.kcl.ac.uk/ess/echo/presentation/15885525-ff02-4ab2-b0b9-9ba9d97ca266/media.m4v http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/biomedical-forum/recorded-fora/ Line 410 redirect 301 /Professionals/Biomedicalforum/Recordedfora/Mp3%20http:/kplayer.kcl.ac.uk/ess/echo/presentation/15885525-ff02-4ab2-b0b9-9ba9d97ca266/media.mp3 http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/biomedical-forum/recorded-fora/ #Old site pagination URLs redirected to new "news" top level page - Here I am simply pointing all the pagination URLs for the news section, that were indexed, to the main news page. These work but append the pagination code on to the new visible URL. Have I got the syntax correct in this version of the lines to suppress the appended garbage? RewriteRule ^/LatestNews.aspx(?:.*) http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/? [R=301,L] #On the old site many news directories (blog effectively) contained articles that are unmatched on the new site, have been redirected to new top level news (blog) page: In this section I became confused about whether to use Redirect Match or RewriteRule to point the articles in each year directory back to the top level news page. When I have added a redirectmatch command - it has been disabling the whole site! Despite my syntax check telling me it is syntactically correct. Currently I'm getting a 404 for any of the old URLs in these year by year directories, instead of a successful redirect. I suspect Regex lingo is not clicking for me 😉 My logic here was rewrite any aspx file in the directory to the latest news page at the top. This is my latest attempt to rectify the fault. Am I nearer with my syntax or my logic? The actual URLs and paths have been substituted, but the structure is the same). So what I believe I have set up is: in an earlier section; News posts that have been recreated in the new site are redirected 1 - 1 and they are working successfully. If a matching URL is not found, when the parsing of the file reaches the line for the 1934 directory it should read any remaining .aspx URL request and rewrite it to the latest news page as a 301 and stop processing this block of commands. The subsequent commands in this block repeat the process for the other year groups of posts. Clearly I am failing to comprehend something and illumination would be gratefully received. RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1934/(.*).aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] #------Old site 1933 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1933/(.*).aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] #------Old site 1932 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1932/(.*)/.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] #------Old site 1931 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1931/(.*)/.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] #------Old site 1930 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1930/(.*)/.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] Many thanks if anyone can help me understand the logic at work here.0 -
Importance of 301 Redirects
Hello, I have been brought in at the last minute to consult for an e-commerce client who is about to relaunch their website. The site currently receives 8000 visits a month, 3100 of which are from organic search. They have a few thousand product pages. The web development firm they are using is changing all of the old product page urls and using 'search engine friendly' urls for the new site, which is expected to launch in a few weeks. However, they did not/are not planning on including 301 redirects from the old URLs. Other than simply stating 'this will be bad for your SEO', what would be a correct way of explaining to the client how much of a problem it will be if their new site launches without 301s. For example, is this a big enough issue to delay the launch of the site / get in a contract dispute with the web developer?
Technical SEO | | stageagent0 -
Product Level 301 Redirects Best Practice
When creating a 301 mapping file for product pages, what is best practice
Technical SEO | | Bucktown
for which version of the URL to redirect to? Base directory or one
subdirectory/category path. Example Old URL: www.example.com/clothing/pants/blue-pants-123 Which of the following should be the new target URL: www.example.com/apparel/pants/blue-pants-123 www.example.com/apparel/blue-apparel/blue-pants-123 www.example.com/apparel/collections/spring-collection/blue-pants-123 www.example.com/blue-pants-123 This is assuming the canonical tag will be www.example.com/blue-pants-123. Also, if www.example.com/blue-pants-123 cannot be reached via site
navigation would it be detrimental to make that the target URL if Google
cannot crawl that naturally? Thanks0 -
301 redirect from Blogger
Hello, I have a client with a Wordpress network of blogs, each blog is owned by a different blogger. Many of them were migrated time ago from Blogger. I have seen that the way used to redirect them is a meta refresh, so no authority is being passed. I cannot find any reliable way of making a 301 from Blogger, There are some plugins, but I'm afraid of using them. Any of you have experience with this situation please? I have even thought about placing a global rel canonical before the meta refresh, but I think that here the problem is the meta refresh itself.... Thank you in advance
Technical SEO | | Juandbbam0 -
Where to put 301 redirects in Magento?
I will be changing the URL structure in a magento store from "base/category/subcategory/product" to "base/product" which means i have to make over 1000 URL 301 redirects so our old links still work. Should i put the redirects in a .htaccess file so they stay intact no matter what or should i just put them in with all the other rewrites (in Magento 's URL rewrite manager)? Thanks
Technical SEO | | tilenkrivec0 -
301 redirects
Hi, I am a working on a new web site, and I want to redirect all the urls of another site (on a different host) to this one. According to both hosts it is "impossible" to do this for all urls. I don't believe that to be the case, but how do I do this? And, should both sites be hosted on the same server first?
Technical SEO | | vibelingo0 -
301 redirects tanked our site on google - what now?
We had several hundred old pages on the site with duplicate content and new pages with fresh info on the same topics. So I redirected the old pages to the new pages. Next day, plop, we're dumped off google for almost every keyword. Dang I thought they didn't want duplicate content and old funky pages. What did I do wrong and what can I do to fix it? Thanks so much for anyone who can share their expertise. Jean
Technical SEO | | JeanYates0 -
301 Redirection of entire section to the homepage
Hi Guys, So here's the deal. Let's say I have a site at mysite.com/ which talks about tomatoes, and I also have a subsection that talks about potatoes at mysite.com/potatoes I want to stop providing information about potatoes altogether so i'm thinking about doing a 301 redirection from all of the pages at mysite.com/potatoes(.*) to the home page. The thing is, mysite.com/potatoes actually has a great page authority (3475 links from 145 domains) so I really don't wan to lose all that juice... Here are my questions: Will the links be added to the ones i have for the homepage already? Since my home page and my /potatoes section ranked for 2 different subjects, how is this transfer going to affect my rankings for the homepage? will it now also rank for both tomatoes AND potatoes? How much time does it usually take for google to recognize the 301 and pass the link juice? Any other tips on optimizing this process? Thank you for your time! -francois
Technical SEO | | nyakim0