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
-
Cache and index page of Mobile site
Hi, I want to check cache and index page of mobile site. I am checking it on mobile phone but it is showing the cache version of desktop. So anybody can tell me the way(tool, online tool etc.) to check mobile site index and cache page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Can you no index a page in Wordpress from just Google news?
I'm trying to find a plugin for Wordpress that enables you to no-index an individual page from Google news but not from Google search results. We want to remove some of our pages from Google news without hurting others.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | uSw0 -
Change post with date to page without date
what to do with posts that should be pages. One of our clients is a nation wide company with different local pages, targeting city+business. This week we found out that every page has a publishing date in the search results. So the pages are not pages but posts? the publishing dates are a some time ago and we think they hurt the rankings. We want to make those post/ pages, but does this bring any risk? example: plumbing.com/chigaco to the same url? and just change code? the website is build in something called "send".
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | remkoallertz0 -
Would be the network site map page considered link spam
In the course of the last 18 months my sites have lost from 50 to 70 percent of traffic. Never have used any tricks, just simple white-hat SEO. Anyway, I am now trying to fix things that hadn't been a problem before all those Google updates, but apparently now are. Would appreciate any help.. I used to have a network site map page on everyone of my sites (about 30 sites). It basically would be a page called 'our network' and it'll show a list of links to all of my other sites. These pages were indexed, had decent PR and didn't seem to cause any problem. Here's an example of one of them:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
http://www.psoriasisguide.ca/psoriasis_scg.html In the light of Panda and Penguin and all these 'bad links' I decided to get rid of most of them. My traffic didn't recover at all, it actually went further down. Not sure if there is any connection to what I'd done. So, the question is: In your opinion/experience, do you think such network sitemap pages could be causing penalties for link spam?0 -
Blog home page and ranking
My question is in regards to ranking a blog under our domain www.xxx.co.uk/blog If we are targeting pc blog should the home page have some content in the side bar or somewhere that stays there contantly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Search results all going to home page
I'm an author, and after doing a search for one of my books I realized that no matter what was searched, the user was getting lead to the homepage. please see the attached picture. How do I fix this and is this hurting my SEO? Capture.JPG Capture1.JPG
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StreetwiseReports0 -
Making a whole site website SSL (https)
Our IT department wants to make a change to our website and serve all the pages under SSL (https). This will be happening at the same time as a move from classic ASP to ASP.Net so the file extensions for non re-written urls will change (this doesn't equate to many). They will be ensuring everything is 301 redirected correctly. Even with this I can't help being very nervous about the change. We have tens of thousands of links to the website gained over many years, and I understand even with 301'ing them they will lose some of their value. We receive tens of thousands of natural visitors per day. Has anyone done anything like this before, or have any advice on whether it is the right thing to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigMiniMan0 -
What is the best tool to crawl a site with millions of pages?
I want to crawl a site that has so many pages that Xenu and Screaming Frog keep crashing at some point after 200,000 pages. What tools will allow me to crawl a site with millions of pages without crashing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iCrossing_UK0