How to redirect whole site to home page without breaking wordpress
-
Hi all
I had a phpprobid site which was heavily indexed but got hacked.
I have deleted the old site and installed wordpress and a holding page.
I can't work out how to 301 redirect all the old indexed pages to the home page without the existing wordpress redirect.
Anyone care to help?
-
Actually, before you redirect ALL errors to the homepage, please do some reading on that tactic:
http://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/seo-and-404-pages/01022013/
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93641
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2409439
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html
Google specifically says (page 13)
Avoid not having a 404 page at all.
Finally:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105
Use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect all pages on your old site to your new site. This tells search engines and users that your site has permanently moved. We recommend that you move and redirect a section or directory first, and then test to make sure that your redirects are working correctly before moving all your content.
Don't do a single redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it's not a good user experience. It's more work, but a page-to-page redirect will help preserve your site's ranking in Google while providing a consistent and transparent experience for your users. If there won't be a 1:1 match between pages on your old site and your new site (recommended), try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.
Google does not recommend this tactic and says "Avoid." That's enough for me. I don't know how to help you with the Mod Rewrite but I wouldn't 301 your 404.
-
Thanks Moosa
I hadn't considered that way of handling the issue.
SEO-wise is that a good tactic or is it best just to salvage something from the train wreck?
-
If there URLs are not available then they must be giving the status of 404 all you have to do is to add a command in the .htaccess that any page that as a status of 404 will redirect to home page so that way all the pages that are no more available will automatically take the user to the home page.
Hope this helps!
-
yeh - they weren't in directories - they were top level - so the old urls are like
xxxx.com/featured,option,auctions_show/
There's over 1000 of them so I was hoping to do a mod rewrite that would 301 them all to the home page without breaking the wordpress rewrite rules.
-
The new Wordpress installation will take all the homepage juice so you don't need to direct home to home.
For all the rest, do you have an old sitemap or directory? You could easily direct old pages to the same relevant new pages or even back to homepage if you need. If you just want the new site.com to take all site.com's old juice - that will happen as Google indexes the new Wordpress.
After that it's simple enough - just Redirect 301 /old-directory/ http://www.site.com in an htaccess file.
Am I missing something in the question?
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
-
Splitting and moving site to two domains - How to redirect
I have a client who is going to split their retail and wholesale business and rebrand the retail biz. So let’s say they are going to move everything from currentdomain.com to either retaildomain.com or wholesaledomain.com. The most important business for them is the retail site, so they want to pass on as much ranking power as they can from currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com. I see two choices here: We can 301 redirect all of currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com, and then redirect any wholesale pages to wholesaledomain.com. The advantage is that we can use GSC’s change of address tool to report the change to Google. The downside is that there is a redirect chain (2 hops) to wholesaledomain.com. Would this confuse Google? Or we can 301 redirect page by page from currentdomain.com to the appropriate page on either new site. This means no redirect chains but it also means that we can’t use GSC’s change of address tool. Which would you do and why? And is there another option that I'm missing? I appreciate any insights you can share.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rich.owings1 -
Landing pages, are my pages competing?
If I have identified a keyword which generates income and when searched in google my homepage comes up ranked second, should I still create a landing page based on that keyword or will it compete with my homepage and cause it to rank lower?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | The_Great_Projects0 -
Dfferent url of some other site is shown by Google in cace copy of our site's page
Hi, When i check cached copy of url of my site http://goo.gl/BZw2Zz , the url in cache copy shown by Google is of some other third party site. Why is Google showing third party url in our site's cached url. Did any of you guys faced any such issue. Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
301 redirect for page 2, page 3 etc of an article or feed
Hey guys, We're looking to move a blog feed we have to a new static URL page. We are using 301 redirects but I'm unsure of what to regarding page 2, page 3 etc. of the feed. How do I make sure those urls are being redirected as well? For example: Moving FloridaDentist.com/blog/dental-tips/ to a new page url FloridaDentist.com/dental-tips. So, we are using a 301 on that old url to the new one. My questions is what to do with the other pages like FloridaDentist.com/blog/dental-tips/page/3. How do we make sure that page is also 301'd to the new main url?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
How to do a site migration followed by a domain migration and avoid 301 redirect chains?
Hi all, The current roadmap for our Eng team has us performing a site migration (redirecting one subfolder to another subfolder) and then a domain migration shortly after. The way I see it, I have 2 scenarios (the 1st involves the site migration THEN the domain migration and the 2nd is the site migration and domain migration being done simultaneously): olddomain.com/subfolder-old to olddomain.com/subfolder-new THEN olddomain.com/subfolder-new to newdomain.com/subfolder-new AND olddomain.com/subfolder-old to newdomain.com/subfolder-new olddomain.com/subfolder-old to newdomain.com/subfolder-new I also understand that there are two best practices for a domain migration and they are 1) keep everything the same that you can to help Google understand it is the same page, just on a different domain and 2) avoid chain redirects. As you can imagine, scenario 1 requires more Eng costs than scenario 2. So, my question is, is scenario 2 a perfectly viable option or should I make the push to go for scenario 1? Any advice is greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brad-causes1 -
Is the Penguin algorithmic penalty on a page basis or a site basis?
Just wondering if there has been any clarification of whether the Penguin algorithmic penalty is on a Page basis or a Site basis? In other words, is it all or nothing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | darkgreenguy0 -
Wordpress site architecture conflicts and how to go about fixing them
I am attempting to figure something out with a site I'm trying to fix. So the problem is that I've got two categories that are basically related keywords. I set this up when I first started doing this work and didn't know what I was doing. So that site at one time was ranking on the first page for a specific term (example: 'project manager salary' and posted in the category 'project manager salary'. But they we added 'project manager salary in Vermont' and all other 50 posts for all states in a different category called, 'project manager salaries and benefits'. So my question is this: Would this cause some kind of keyword rank cannibalization? How do I fix this properly? Thanks! Michael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtking.us_gmail.com0 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0