Htaccess 301s to 3 different sites
-
Hi,
I'm an htaccess newbie, and I have to redirect and split traffic to three new domains from site A.
The original home page has most of the inbound links so I've set up a 301 that goes to site B, the new corporate domain.
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]Brand websites C and D need 301s for their folders in site A but I have no idea how to write that in relationship to the first redirect, which really is about the home page, contact and only a few other pages.
The urls are duplicates except for the new domain names. They're all on Linux..Site A is about 150 pages, should I write it by page, or can I do some kind of catch all (the first 301) plus the two folders?
I'd really appreciate any insight you have and especially if you can show me how to write it.
Thanks
-
You are most welcome! Appreciate your feedback that it worked!
-
Yannick, it worked like a charm to all three new sites. Great info, thank you for taking the time to help me out.
-
You're welcome!
Hope everything works out!
Test a few URL's first. Or even better: setup a small test case to make sure it works!
-
Greatness. Thanks!
-
RedirectMatch 301 /subdirectoryA/(.*) http://www.websiteB.com/$1
and
RedirectMatch 301 /subdirectoryB/(.*) http://www.websiteC.com/$1
Otherwise it wont work
About the htaccess from the old site... As long as Website A (the old site) is still up and the redirects on that site is properly set up in the htaccess on that server, I don't see any reason to also use it on the new sites.
-
Thanks Yannick
I'm tracking with you except I have to make the subfolders go not to site B, but new sites...C and D. So can I do it like this:
RedirectMatch 301 /subdirectory/(.*) http://www.websiteC.com/$1
and then
RedirectMatch 301 /subdirectory/(.*) http://www.websiteD.com/$1
The urls match. But the subfolder pages have very few links so I'm less concerned about link juice then just getting the indexing to avoid a bunch of 404s.
The subdirectories on site A got split into 2 freestanding domains for "branding"....and have added a bunch of new pages that don't correspond to the old folder (though some do). They also moved from drupal to WP and I wonder if I need the old htaccess instructions for drupal ? We're keeping the old site in place for a while during the migration.
Thanks so much again for the reply
-
Hi Ellen,
If you only wanted to redirect all the url's in a certain subdirectory to the new site (not 1-on1), your redirect would look something like this:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/subdirectory/$ http://www.websiteB.com/
But... I dont think you want to do that
(Or should do that...) I think you should want to redirect all pages in the subdirectory to their corresponding url on websiteB.
What I mean by that is: you should redirect all your pages 1-on1, like this:
Redirect: www.websiteA.com/subdirectory/url1.html to its equivalent on website B's url: www.websiteB.com/url1.html
If you want to do that, you can. But the url's have to be the same. You can do something like:
RedirectMatch 301 /subdirectory/(.*) http://www.websiteB.com/$1
If the url's change, than you have to do more manual work. You should always try to redirect as many pages 1on1 as you can. Especially the ones that receive external links. The new pages will be almost as "juicy" as the old pages, because the 301 redirect passes the linkjuice along. (not all of it though, but like 90% - 99%)
Is this pushing you a bit in the right direction?
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
-
Our client's site was owned by former employee who took over the site. What should be done? Is there a way to preserve all the SEO work?
A client had a member of the team leave on bad terms. This wasn't something that was conveyed to us at all, but recently it came up when the distraught former employee took control of the domain and locked everyone out. At first, this was assumed to be a hack, but eventually it was revealed that one of the company starters who unhappily left the team owned the domain all along and is now holding it hostage. Here's the breakdown: -Every page aside from the homepage is now gone and serving a 404 response code -The site is out of our control -The former employee is asking for a $1 million ransom to sell the domain back -The homepage is a "countdown clock" that isn't actively counting down, but claims that something exciting is happening in 3 days and lists a contact email. The question is how we can save the client's traffic through all this turmoil. Whether buying a similar domain and starting from square one and hoping we can later redirect the old site's pages after getting it back. Or maybe we have a legal claim here that we do not see even though the individual is now the owner of the site. Perhaps there's a way to redirect the now defunct pages to a new site somehow? Any ideas are greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Hosting set up in different country
Hi Guy's, I was wondering if it matters if your hosting servers is set on a different country than where you're website is targeting (.de (germany) website and the server is in france) Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO2 -
How to Switch My Site to HTTPS in GWT?
I recently bought an SSL certificate and moved my site over to HTTPS. Now how do I make the change in Google Webmaster Tools?
Technical SEO | | sbrault740 -
Why is this site ranking better than me
Hi just used the compare tool to try and find out why a site is ranking better than me http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.lifestylemonthly.co.uk%2F my site is www.in2town.co.uk and the site i am comparing with is http://www.lifestylemonthly.co.uk/ Can anyone explain what is going on and how i can achieve better ranking results
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
My site cannot be found by google at all
I don't know why but our company site can not be found by google at all. I have submitted to google webmaster, have social media point to, etc, Is there any reason for this? url for our website is www.bistosamerica.com Thank you
Technical SEO | | BistosAmerica0 -
How do you find bad links to your site?
My website has around 900 incoming links and I have a Google 50 penalty that is sitewide. I have been doing research and from what I can see is that the 50 penalty is usually associated with scetchy links. The penalty started last year. I had about 40 related domains to my main site and each had a simple one page site with a link to the main site. (I know I screwed up) I cleaned up all of those links by removing them. The single page site still exist, but they have no links and several of them still rank very well. I also had an outside SEO person that bought a few links. I came clean with Google and told them everything. I gave them all of my sites and that the SEO person had bought links. I gave them full disclosure and removed everything. I have one site that I can't get the link removed from. I have contacted them numerous times to remove the link and I get no response. I am curious if anyone has had a simular experience and how they corrected the situation. Another issue is that my site is "thin" because its an ecommerce affiliate site and full of affiliate links. I work in the costume market. I'm also afraid that I have other bad links pointing to my site. Dooes anyone know of a tool to identify bad links that Google may be penalizing me for at this time. Here is Google's latest denial of my reconsideration request. Dear site owner or webmaster of XXXXXXXXX.com. We received a request from a site owner to reconsider XXXXXXXX.com for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from XXXXXXXXXX.com may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality
Technical SEO | | tadden0 -
Too many 301s?
Hi there, If there is a website that has accidently generated say 1,000 pages of duplicate content, would the seo be hurt if all those pages were re-directed to the origional source of the content? There are no plans to re-write the 1,000 duplicate pages, they are already cached and indexed by Google. I thought about canonical tags but as they have some traffic and a little seo value i thought 301 re-direct would be more appropiate to the relevant pages? I am also right in thinking you would be able to remove the 301 in the .htaccess file once the index has updated? Also once removed the 301 - i could use those urls later from scratch if i wanted? Any info much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Site Architecture Trade Off
Hi All I'm looking for some feedback regarding a site architecture issue I'm having with a client. They are about to enter a re-design and as such we're restructuring the site URLs and amending/ adding pages. At the moment they have ranked well off the back of original PPC landing pages that were added onto the site, such as www.company.com/service1, www.company.com/service2, etc The developer, from a developer point of view wished to create a logical site architecture with multiple levels of directories etc. I've suggested this probably isn't the best way to go, especially as the site isn't that large (200-300 pages) and that the key pages we're looking to rank should be as high up the architecture as we can make them, and that this amendment could hurt their current high rankings. It looks like the trade off may be that the client is willing to let some pages be restructured so for example, www.company.com/category/sub-category/service would be www.company.com/service. However, although from a page basis this might be a solution, is there a drawback to having this in place for only a few pages rather than sitewide? I'm just wondering if these pages might stick out like a sore thumb to Google.
Technical SEO | | PerchDigital1