Best Way to Re-Direct traffic from existing site to new site?
-
Good Morning,
I have an existing site (http://goo.gl/QKkpi) running on a slow server.
We decided to create a new site (http://goo.gl/XUH3f) with the intention of de-commissioning the first one.
Both sites are on the same WMT account. What is the best way to permanently redirect any backlinks/traffic (all levels, from home page to product pages) from the old site to the new site (prior to shutting down the first one).
Thanks a lot!
-
It goes in the .htaccess file on the old site.
Thanks
David
-
By the way, where is that script entered ? On the new site or the old site (they are on different hosts)..
thanks
-
Thank you both.
I will try this out and let you know
-
Keri is right, if you are going to be using an identical strucure on your new site and all pages are going to be carried across, you can use this redirect that will just transfer the old domain URL's to the identical new one:
RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$ RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
So the old url http://www.oldsite.com/best-red-shoes
Would automatically direct to http://www.newsite.com/best-red-shoes
Note; this is for an Apache server
David
-
Aside from the domain name, is the URL structure identical between the two sites? If so, there should be a real easy redirect to just say "if person hit oldsite.com/page123 take them to newsite.com/page123". I don't know that exact code, but can get someone on here who does.
-
Sadly if you want to be really specific and get the maximum value, it will be a manual task.
Excel can be your friend here, and it would make quite a quick job of it.
If you didn't want to spend that much time on it, you could be a bit vaguer and do it at a folder level (e.g 301 all pages in /blog folder to the new /blog.html page), but you wouldn't be getting the full value from your old site.
Let me know if you want any help or advice.
Thanks,
David
-
Is there a way to do this easily for 4,000 pages or does it have to be done one by one?
-
Hi,
Use a page level 301 redirect. So go through each page of your old site, and find the most relevant page to it on the new site, and 301 it across using the htaccess file.
This will give you the most benefit in terms of traffic and SEO, plus it will keep your users happy as they will be landing on a relevant page on the new site if they come through an external link or search result.
Good luck with the new site.
Thanks,
David
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
-
Has anyone transferred a site from WordPress to Webflow?
We're thinking about making the move, but I'm (mildly) concerned about SEO implications.
Web Design | | lauraballer0 -
Large Global Site Structure
Hi, I have a question about the advised structure for a website that I'm currently building. It's a large international brand with it's main office in the UK. The main website is the .com but there is a growing international franchisee network. I've built the .com site on Wordpress but I'm not sure if I the best way forward would be to create each international website on a separate hosted site or just include it in the .com Wordpress structure using the The WordPress Multilingual Plugin. So to sum up... should I build the entire global network on one domain and then use WPML plugin or should I build separate websites for each International franchisee? Hope some one can educate me on the best route to take. Thanks Moz Community
Web Design | | SeoSheikh0 -
New To SEO Management, I just want to double check that my idea will work.
I am new to SEO management. I had a 3 month SEO copy writing internship and a 5 month SEO temp job. In both I mostly wrote copy, but I've been teaching myself SEO on the side, I became Google certified. I ended up getting a telemarketing job and somehow the conversation of SEO came up and I winded up managing their SEO for 12 dollars an hour. They say that every lead generated from the website that turns into a sale will be worth 10 dollars and if and when the sales exceed my paycheck I will starting making commission so long as it stays above my hourly. SEO is very fun and this is like my dream job. They are leaving the planning 100% up to me and I want to make sure that what I am doing will work. My plan is as follows: Part 1: Page Authority via backlinks and social media We are health care brokers and my boss, the owner has a lot of contact. He is talking with large unions like, "The Teamsters," and large company retirment groups like, "Blue flame," which is apparently in some way connected to DTE or GE. Long story short, I am trying to get him to convince them to give us a back link to our main page. He also has a ton of clients that own companies. This is good because they may be persuaded to give us backlinks too. In addition, the tech guy thinks he can implement something where we can get a google +1, facebooks likes/shares, twitter likes and shares and pintrest pin it's that would be a part of an email that we send to people within the list of 12,000 clients. From what I can see, from the client base and the people we are working with we should be able to raise the page authority substantially despite the fact that the site is only a few months old and is not yet out of the sand box. I have been slowly picking off each error with SEO MOZ's website crawling. Part 2: Making a Insurance Jargon Dictionary Guide For The Tri-purpose of gathering traffic, proving our professionalism and helping people understand semi-complex insurance jargon. I could build these 2-3 keywords would be addressed per page and they would be defined in a way to help people looking for terms understand them, while simultaneously netting a strong keyword density and a strong page. I think as far as I can tell there are no issues. Part 3: The dictionary pages will pull in new traffic and the home page will receive links and distribute link juice to the sub-pages. This subpages will guide traffic back to the main page with no-follow links to direct people from the unique termed landing pages to the home page for insurance processing. As far as I can tell my logic is solid and on paper this should work. Am I missing anything (like key details, flaws in my plan)?
Web Design | | Tediscool0 -
Existing URL structure and how to handle new pages before migration
Hi there! Currently, our site uses underscores "_" within the url structure. We are moving to Wordpress soon (the site is currently static html) but it will be a couple of months before the migration. Here is an example of the current structure: www.oldsitestructure.com/about_us/success_stories/custom_vinyl_banners When we do change, our url structure will have hyphen's "-" to separate terms, so the preferred new structure will be: www.oldsitestructure.com/about-us/success-stories/custom-vinyl-banners The entire site (with the exception of our Wordpress blog) currently uses the old structure. We have about 10 - 15 pages we will add before our migration, my question is: Should we use the preferred url structure starting NOW or stick with the old one? And set up 301 redirects are part of the migration process? Many thanks!
Web Design | | SEOSponge
Jon0 -
Sitemap Question - Very Old Ecommerce Site, Never Used A Map
I help manage a family website, that has about 10,000 products... It was top ranked since 1996, then got smacked by Penguin and recovered but its still receiving only a fraction of the natural traffic it used to get. Something we have never used... Is a sitemap. I'm curious if anyone knows reliable software that will generate a sitemap? My cart is custom built, website uses html pages across the board. Dynamic content and parameters are set up properly, onsite seo is in the excellent range. The only thing that I haven't been utilizing is a sitemap. Because the cart was hand built, it would a huge convenience to use a lightweight program thats compatible with any website, has parameter settings, exclusions and anything else useful to negate any duplicate content. I have a few highly dynamic pages as well... If anyone knows a product or a possible solution, it would be much appreciated. Working it up myself would be very time consuming. Thx
Web Design | | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants0 -
Many errors from previous ecommerce site. Domain is now just a localized wordpress site.
Many errors from previous ecommerce site. Do I need to redirect every single page that no longer exists at this domain? loveyourcabinets.com used to be loveyourkitchenandbath.com but we have since changed course. We want loveyourkitchenandbath.com to be our local site on Long Island and NYC. Loveyourcabinets.com will be an ecommerce project that I'll be revamping in the coming months. I think Moz as well as Google still has all of the old ecommerce pages indexed. And of course, Moz is shooting me a bunch of error all regarding pages from the ecommerce site that used to be on loveyourkitchenandbath.com. Any thoughts? Commentary? Thx
Web Design | | loveyourkitchen0 -
Schema.org - Right way to mark the pages
Dear all, Almost since we started designing our site, we are using schema microdata. It is not only because of the rich snippets, but because I want the search engines to better understand what we have. For example, the +1 buttom would not work properly without schema microdata, because it kind of ignores the OpenGraph parameters that specified image and description; and since we are a (very small) local bussiness directory (between other things), all our clients have a hand written schema complient description on their lisings, including address, opening ours, telephone number, description, etc. It is hand written by us because the tools avialable are simply not good enough to cover all different scenarios that a listing can present. I have not use, until today, a proper for the homepage, and it is probably the cause that our page lost the nice links below the site description in the google snippet. I did not place it on the body tag, but near the description, closing it inmediately after the description finishs. Now this is solved and we will wait to see if the links come back in the next weeks. Now to the question. Our site has three sections, with three different systems installed, two running wordpress and a third running another script. the main site is the local bussiness directory. The front page is mark as "schema.org/WepPage", and I do not know how to mark the other pages of the main site. I was thinking of marking the listings as "schema.org/ItemPage" since they are related to specific clients. Would you consired it to be right? Then, we have landing pages for the categories, should they be mark as WepPage, or as an Article, or something else? Many thanks in advance for your help, Best Regards, Daniel
Web Design | | te_c0 -
Redesign of an ecommerce site
We are thinking to redesign our ecommerce site and was wondering would we loose our google rankings in any way? That's something we don't want. We want to achieve a better and cleaner looking website. It's a more like template redesign. But adding extra functionalities. We will add upselling and crossselling features to product pages. Some products have reviews and some don't. If a product doesn't have a review random testimonials will replace the reviews. We will redirect all urls's if category structure changes. All content title, headings remain same. Any suggestions are welcome 🙂
Web Design | | Jvalops0