Move to a new domain - How to get the redirects right?
-
Hi,
I hope that someone with good htaccess knowledge can help.
I am planning on moving my site to a new domain. I understand that I should make 301 redirects using htaccess for every URL. This is a big site so it will be impossible to not forget some of the thousands existing URLs.
Now to the question: How do I make all the URLs that is not specified in htaccess to redirect to my new root?
Thanks!
-
Oops, I forgot to update this question after I came to a conclusion. Thanks for answering!
The redirects I ended up with looks like this:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^old-product.html$ http://www.new-domain.com/new-product.html [R=301]
RewriteRule ^old-category$ http://www.new-domain.se/new-category [R=301]I tried first to write them the way you suggest but it didn't work the way I wanted it do for category pages (or folders).
And I generated an .xml sitemap for the old site first that I used as a list of all URLs to redirect to so I think I covered them all.
-
You don't actually want to do what you're asking - that would mean that no page on your site would 404 (if any missing page redirected to the root).
Better:
Redirect individual pages using:
RedirectPermanent oldpage.html newpage.html
Redirect sections using RedirectMatch or RewriteRule. Then set up a way of tracking 404 errors - either by checking your log files or by doing something like this to track them in google analytics:
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2006/09/tip-tracking-404-pages.html
Then, when you have a list of pages you missed or forgot, you can add redirections for those pages as well.
I hope that makes sense.
-
**** deleted
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
-
Redirection of 100 domain to Main domain affects SEO?
Hi guys, An email software vendor managed by a different area of my company redirected 100 domains used for unsolicited email campaigns to my main domain. These domains are very likely to get blacklisted at some point. My SEO tool now is showing me all those domains as "linking" to my main site as do-follow links. The vendor states that this will not affect my main domain/website in any way. I'm highly concerned. I would appreciate your professional opinion about this. Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anagentile0 -
Change domain.com to www.domain.com - influence on linkbuilding, seo, etc.
Hello, Do you know what can happen when i change domain.com to www.domain.com? Will it have an influence to my link-building portfolio (external links to domain.com), position on google search, etc. Thank you for help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Reyzer0 -
New domain purchase 301 and 404 issues. Please help!
We recently purchased www.carwow.com and 301 redirected the site to www.carwow.co.uk (our main domain). The problem is that carwow.com had URLs indexed like www.carwow.com/a-b-c the 301 sends them to carwow.co.uk/a-b-c which obviously doesn't exist so is a 404! What should be done in this situation? Should it be ignored and not re-directed at all, or is there a way to delete/disavow these dead pages? An SEO has advised we redirect all pages to the homepage, but won't that mess up the link profile? Any advice would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesPursey0 -
New website from scratch and redirects or maintaining domain?
Hi friends, I have to face a big challenge. My client has an online store with about 250 products. The store is based on a web service provider whose CMS gives critical duplicate content issues. My client is considering to rethink the store from scratch and choose a CMS that offers more guarantees. I have two options: Starting the store from scratch with new domain and make redirects (whole domain or page to page?) Maintaining the domain, careful to keep the current structure of the URL, which is currently pretty bad I hope you could help me. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sergio_redondo0 -
Should I buy a .co domain if my preferred .com and .co.uk domain are taken by other companies?
I'm looking to boost my website ranking and drive more traffic to it using a keyword rich domain name. I want to have my nearest city followed by the keyword "seo" in the domain name but the .co.uk and .com have already been taken. Should I take the plunge and buy .co at a higher price? What options do I have? Also whilst we're on domains and URL's is it best to separate keywords in url's with a (_) or a (-)? Many thanks for any help with this matter. Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoSheikh0 -
Redirecting 2 aged site to brand spanking new one
Does 301 redircting 2 aged domain to a new one have a compounding effect? Ive redirected domain #1 to teh new site and my new domain has now jumped to position 6 on Google for the keyword. I have noticed that the sites above me are all aged domains and some with very few backlinks. Number 1 is 4 years old and 20 backlinks, thats it! I am wondering, if I redirected a 11 year old domain that is in the same niche, but never really targeteed that same keyword, would that bump my site even higher? Obviously i am building quality backlinks to the new domain and making sure these are hard to get high quality backlinks. Thanks for your help guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
How does one know where to insert the right strips of coding on the right pages for Canonical Links?
On my Website, I am the only SEO optimizer wizard person. I have to teach myself everything and I get overwhelmed a lot. I recently started using SEOMOZ and on my report it stated we had duplicate page titles and that it was bad and should be fixed quickly. So I did my research and found that I needed to use canonical links to reference one page to be indexed. However my problem lies in exactly how to add this coding to my site. I greatly appreciate any help or at least looking at this question.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FrontlineMobility0 -
Moving poor content to its own domain may risk being seen as a doorway page?
We have decided to move some thin content from our primary domain to an independent domain in order to lift the panda penalty. Does anyone have suggestions for how to avoid being seen as a doorway page? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0