How to redirect whole site to home page without breaking wordpress

[RaceMedia]

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?

[MattAntonino]

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

And in this: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

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.

[RaceMedia]

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?

[MoosaHemani]

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!

[RaceMedia]

yeh - they weren't in directories - they were top level - so the old urls are like

xxxx.com/wanted_ads.php

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.

[MattAntonino]

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?