Is this a safe 301 redirect?
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We are moving our site from one platform to another. Currently on our site we have two homepages. "www.homepage.com" and "www.homepage.com/Index" Both pages have some high quality links pointing in on them.
The problem:
We are going to be doing a 301 redirect from "www.homepage.com/Index" page to "www.homepage.com" as we are moving platforms at this time we weren't going to create a "www.homepage.com/Index" page all. This leaves this page as an empty URL. With this webpage disappearing all together will we lose traction as we are redirecting an empty URL? Or is it better to recreate this "www.homepage.com/Index" on our new platform redirect it and wait for google to deIndex this page for us?
As well is there a tutorial for how to implement 301 redirects or is this something worth looking for a developer and pay someone to do?
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Great advice Ryan.
I'll make sure to keep an eye on that redirecting and keep it from going into a never ending loop. I can see how that could easily happen. I'll look into a developer, sounds like the safest bet.
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Be wary of redirecting /index to / as this could leave your server in an infinite loop if your server considers /index to be a valid way of loading the content at / (and lots do).
There are lots of tutorials on the web for how to do this, but if you're not comfortable editing an .htaccess file its probably worth the extra money to have someone familiar with apache and regular expressions to do it for you.
Here's an example of how I do something similar on my site, in my .htaccess file:
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on
# Redirect index.html to the root mydomain.org
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.mydomain.org/ [R=301,L]</ifmodule> -
Having two homepages sounds weird to me. I'd definitely opt for 301 redirecting /Index to your regular home page to pass all the link juice to one page. The old /Index page isn't really an "empty" URL, it will redirect to your regular home page, so people who try to navigate there will see your regular home page.
How to implement the redirect I believe will depend on what you're running your server on (Apache, etc).
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