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
-
Ecommerce Site - Duplicate product descriptions & SKU pages
Hi I have a couple of questions regarding the best way to optimise SKU pages on a large ecommerce site. At the moment we have 2 landing pages per product - one is the primary landing page with no SKU, the other includes the SKU in the URL so our sales people & customers can find it when using the search facility on the site. The SKU landing page has a canonical pointing to the primary page as they're duplicates. Is this the best way? Or is it better to have the one page with the SKU in the URL? Also, we have loads of products with the very similar product descriptions, I am working on trying to include a unique paragraph or few sentences on these to improve the content - how dangerous is the duplicate content within your own site? I know its best to have totally unique content, but it won't be possible on a site with thousands of products and a small team. At the moment I am trying to prioritise the products to update. Thank you 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
What to do when you buy a Website without it's content which has a few thousand pages indexed?
I am currently considering buying a Website because I would like to use the domain name to build my project on. Currently that domain is in use and that site has a few thousand pages indexed and around 30 Root domains linking to it (mostly to the home page). The topic of the site is not related to what I am planing to use it for. If there is no other way, I can live with losing the link juice that the site is getting at the moment, however, I want to prevent Google from thinking that I am trying to use the power for another, non related topic and therefore run the risk of getting penalized. Are there any Google guidelines or best practices for such a case?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeAir0 -
Should I start new domain and redirect site?
I recently my rankings for http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (some adult content) drop off a cliff. Google tells me there's no manual penalty therefore it might be algorithmic. I don't know why my rankings went but I think it could be that I added A LOT of category pages pulling the same content from posts and this could have caused both duplicate content issues and too many on page links causing an algo penalty. Ive deleted the categories and therefore fixed duplicate content issue (perhaps you guys could check out the site and see that you agree with me) but rankings have not improved even thougo most of the pages have been recrawled. I read somewhere its extremely hard to recover from such a penalty so should I move my site to a and domain and redirect all urls? I can't think of another solution. Any help appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
301 redirect a old site that has been "dead" for a while?
Hi guys, A quick question. I have a client who has an old business website that had some great links (Forbes.com, CocaCola.com, etc). The problem is that he knew nothing about SEO and let the hosting expire. He still owns the domain, but the site is no longer listed in Google. He did no SEO, so I am not worried about being hit by any artificial anchor text penalties, since the links are as natural as it gets. So my questions is, would there be any benefit from 301 redirecting that site to his new business? The new business is in almost exactly the same niche as the old site. I am thinking of 301'ing to a sub-page which will refer to his past venture with the old business, not to the homepage of the new site. Thanks in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Rel Canonical on Home Page
I have a client who says they can't implement a 301 on their home page. They have tow different urls for their home page that are live and do not redirect. I know that the best solution would be to redirect one to the main URL but they say this isn't possible. So they implemented the rel canonical instead. Is this the second best solution for them if they can't redirect? Will the link juice be passed through the rel canonical? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Redirect or Rewrite? 2 pages ranking
We have two pages ranking for "Custom Web Design" http://www.imageworksstudio.com/custom-web-design ranks higher (consistently 9-13) and http://www.imageworksstudio.com/content/custom-web-design ranks around 35-40 the latter is actually an older version of the article that never was replaced or taken down - but it has the majority of the links to it Wondering if we should update the old content so it is not similar to the one that is ranking better or if we should redirect everything to /custom-web-design to see if it can secure better rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612900 -
Migrating a site from a standalone site to a subdivision of large .gov.uk site
The scenario We’ve been asked by a client, a Non-Government Organisation who are being absorbed by a larger government ministry, for help with the SEO of their site. They will be going from a reasonably large standalone site to a small sub-directory on a high authority government site and they want some input on how best to maintain their rankings. They will be going from the Number 1 ranked site in their niche (current site domainRank 59) to being a sub directory on a domainRank 100 site). The current site will remain, but as a members only resource, behind a paywall. I’ve been checking to see the impact that it had on a related site, but that one has put a catch all 302 redirect on it’s pages so is losing the benefit of a it’s historical authority. My thoughts Robust 301 redirect set up to pass as much benefit as possible to the new pages. Focus on rewriting content to promote most effective keywords – would suggest testing of titles, meta descriptions etc but not sure how often they will be able to edit the new site. ‘We have moved’ messaging going out to webmasters of existing linking sites to try to encourage as much revision of linking as possible. Development of link-bait to try and get the new pages seen. Am I going about this the right way? Thanks in advance. Phil
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smrs-digital0 -
Redirecting One Page of Content on Domain A to Domain B
Let's say I have a nice page of content on Domain A, which is a strong domain. That page has a nice number of links from other websites and ranks on the first page of the SERPs for some good keywords. However, I would like to move that single page of content to Domain B using a 301 redirect. Domain B is a slightly weaker domain, however, it has better assets to monetize the traffic that visits this page of content. I expect that the rankings might slip down a few places but I am hoping that I will at least keep some of the credit for the inbound links from other websites. Has anyone ever done this? Did it work as you expected? Did the content hold its rankings after being moved? Any advice or philosophical opinions on this? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL2