Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Can you do a 301 redirect without a hosting account?
-
Trying to retire domain1 and 301 it to domain2 - just don't want to get stuck having to pay the old hosting provider simply to serve a .htaccess file with the redirect rule.
-
Yep, I've created subdomain.newdomain.com and that has the htaccess file. Added a cname to my zonefiles to point to the subdomain. Seem to work like a treat so far
-
NameCheap.com is another that will definitely let you 301-redirect one domain to another in the DNS admin (ie no hosting needed)
If you need multiple levels of redirecting, you could just set up the old site as an additional site on the server account that's hosting the new site, and install the htaccess file at its root, with no actual site installed. Then use the old domain's DNS to point to the new location containing the htaccess.
Paul
-
You can do these with forwarding etc. However that isn't the most efficient way.
What you want to do is to "park" the old domain on the new one. In technical terms this means pointing the nameservers at the new hosting account and ensuring that there is MX record for them. Most hosting companies do this for you or have a built in tool. It's very easy and is usually called "domain parking", "domain mapping" or "add on domains".
Doing that will ensure that visitors (and bots) visiting olddomain.com will be served newdomain.com
With that working you can just add an .htaccess rule on newdomain.com to ensure that it 301s correctly to newdomain.com . The same directive can tidy up all your subdomain woes at the same time!
This method has the least points of failiure and creates the fewest redirects. It's also generally the cheapest and easiest to manage. Win!
-
Hi,
Depending on your domain registar you can do URL forwarding (URL forwarding is in fact a fancy name for a 301 redirect). In this case you don't need a hosting account.
For example if you host with Godaddy you can easily do that using the control pannel of your domains.
What domain registar do you use ?
-
Some domain management companies let you do a 301 redirect of a domain to another domain...however they might only do domain.com to newdomain.com not specific/individual and customized redirects.
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
-
Google is still indexing the old domain a year after 301 redirects are put in place
Hi there, You might have experienced this before but for me this is the first. A client of mine moved from domain A (www.domainA.com) to domain B (www.domainB.com). 301 redirects are all in place for over a year. But the old domain is still showing in Google when you search for "site:domainA.com" The HTTP Header check shows this result for the URL https://www.domainA.com/company/cookie-policy.aspx HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently =>
Technical SEO | | iQi
Cache-Control => private
Content-Length => 174
Content-Type => text/html; charset=utf-8
Location => https://www.domain_B_.com/legal/cookie-policy
Server => Microsoft-IIS/10.0
X-AspNetMvc-Version => 5.2
X-AspNet-Version => 4.0.30319
X-Powered-By => ASP.NET
Date => Fri, 15 Mar 2019 12:01:33 GMT
Connection => close Does the redirect look wrong? The change of address request was made on Google Console when the website was moved over a year ago. Edit: Checked the domainA.com on bing and it seems that its not indexed, and replaced with domainB.com, which is the right. Just Google is indexing the old domain! Please let me know your thoughts on why this is happening. Best,0 -
1000 Pages on old website. What to do with the 301 redirects for this domain?
Hi Moz Community, I have a 301 redirect question... I just acquired an old domain: Totally in my niche Domain is 14 years old Website exists of 1000 pages Great amount of backlinks Website is offline since about 2 weeks Will place a new website online asap with new url structure For the 50 best scoring pages I wrote a new, but fully comparable/related article. I will put a 301 redirect from those old to the new pages. My question: What to do with the 950 other url's? Should I put a 301 redirect to the homepage? Should I forward those pages to the 404 page? Should I divide the 950 url's with a 301 redirect to the 50 new ones? Another solution maybe? Any idea what would be the best solution so we can save as much Google juice as possible? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | snorkel0 -
Help Setting Up 301 Redirects from Coldfusion Site to Wordpress Site.
I have created a new website and need to redirect all of the previous pages to the new one. The old website was built in coldfusion and the new site is built in wordpress. One of the pages I'm trying to redirect is www.norriseal.com/products.cfm to http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/. This is what I have in my .htaccess file <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymlinks
Technical SEO | | MarketHubb
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Redirect 301 /products.cfm http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/</ifmodule> The result of this redirect is http://norrisealwellmark.com/products.cfm How do I prevent the .cfm from appending to the destination URL?1 -
Soft 404's on a 301 Redirect...Why?
So we launched a site about a month ago. Our old site had an extensive library of health content that went away with the relaunch. We redirected this entire section of the site to the new education materials, but we've yet to see this reflected in the index or in GWT. In fact, we're getting close to 500 soft 404's in GWT. Our development team confirmed for me that the 301 redirect is configured correctly. Is it just a waiting game at this point or is there something I might be missing? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
CNAME vs 301 redirect
Hi all, Recently I created a website for a new client and my next job is trying to get them higher in Google. I added them in OSE and noticed some strange backlinks. To my surprise the client has about 20 domain names. All automatically poiting to (showing) the same new mainsite now. www.maindomain.nl www.maindomain.be
Technical SEO | | Houdoe
www.maindomain.eu
www.maindomain.com
www.otherdomain.nl
www.otherdomain.com
... Some of these domains have backlinks too (but not so much). I suggested to 301 redirect them all to the main site. Just to avoid duplicate content. But now the webhoster comes into play: "It's a problem, client has only 1 hosting account, blablabla...". They told me they could CNAME the 20 domains to the main domain. Or A-record them to an IP address. This is too technical stuff for me. So my concrete questions are: Is it smart to do anything at all or am I just harming my client? The main site is ranking pretty well now. And some backlinks are from their copy sites (probably because everywhere the logo links to the full mainsite url). Does the CNAME or A-record solution has the same effect as a 301 redirect, from SEO perspective? Many thanks,
Hans0 -
Best Practice on 301 Redirect - Images
We have two sites that sell the same products. We have decided to retire one of the sites as we'd like to focus on one property. I know best practice is to redirect apples to apples, which in our case is easily done since the sites sold the same thing. www.SiteABC.com/ProductA can be redirected to www.SiteXYZ.com/ProductA. My question is how far does that thinking go regarding images? Each product has a main product page, of course, and then up to 6 images in some cases. Is it necessary to redirect www.SiteABC.com/ProductA-Image1.jpg to www.SiteXYZ.com/ProductA-Image1.jpg? Or can they all be redirected to just the product page?
Technical SEO | | Natitude0 -
A script to automatically write 301 redirect rules to htaccess?
I was wondering if anyone could help provide some resources on how to automatically write 301 redirect rules to htaccess. Allow me to explain... I'm building a new website and the primary users are businesses. They have their own profile pages on the site. The URL is based off of their Company Name. In the event that they decided to change their name... reasons being, perhaps they mispelled it the first time, or they're removing LLC or adding Inc, I want to also change the URL and redirect the old URL to the new URL. Since the URL is based off of their Company Name, making a change to the company name would make a change to the URL. I know it doesn't have to work this way, but for our purpose this works best. In case the old URL had any links to it, I wanted to see if there was an way to automatically update an htaccess file with a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. Could anyone point me in the right direction of how to do this? Perhaps a sample script. I've done a lot of searches on Google and can't seem to find anything. e.g. Original:
Technical SEO | | bimmer540
Name: XYZ Widgets
URL: website.com/xyz-widgets New - business changes their company name in their profile:
Name: XYZ Widgets, Inc.
URL: website.com/xyz-widgets-inc Upon the user saving the changes in their profile, I'd like to write a 301 redirect to an htaccess file:
Redirect 301 /xyz-widgets http://www.website.com/xyz-widgets-inc I know how to manually write redirects and I've got a pretty smart web developer. We've just never triggered a script to automatically write to an htaccess file before. Is this possible? Any resources are appreciated. Any security risks? Thanks!0 -
How long should I keep 301 redirects?
I have modified a the URL structure of a whole section of a website and used mod_rewrite 301 redirect to match the new structure. Now that was around 3 months ago and I was wondering how long should I keep this redirect for? As it is a new website I am quite sure that there are no links around with the old URL structure but still I can see the google bot trying from time to time to access the old URL structure. Shouldn't the google bot learn from this 301 redirect and not go anymore for the old URL?
Technical SEO | | socialtowards0