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
-
301 Redirect for multiple links
I just relaunched my website and changed a permalink structure for several pages where only a subdirectory name changed. What 301 Redirect code do I use to redirect the following? I have dozens of these where I need to change just the directory name from "urban-living" to "urban", and want it to catch the following all in one redirect command. Here is an example of the structure that needs to change. Old
Technical SEO | | shawnbeaird
domain.com/urban-living (single page w/ content)
domain.com/urban-living/tempe (single page w/ content)
domain.com/urban-living/tempe/the-vale (single page w/ content) New
domain.com/urban
domain.com/urban/tempe
domain.com/urban/tempe/the-vale0 -
Questions about the Sandbox and 301 Redirects
Does the sandbox still exist? What if you have a brand new URL and do a 301 redirect from another website because the name of the service business changed? Thanks for any insight and help.
Technical SEO | | SDSLaw0 -
301 Redirect with index.asp
I am very new to all of this so forgive the newbie questions I will get better. Ok so after starting a campaign I see that I have many issues including where some pages are being deemed as duplicate content. 1. The report says the http://lucid8.com has duplicate content on 2 other pages 2. When I look at them it shows that http://lucid8.com/index.asp and http://www.lucid8.com are duplicates. 3. Really these are the exactly the same page because the default page that is opened for www.lucid8.com http://www.lucid8.com etc always opens the index.asp page. 4. Now I read that I should do permanent redirects and how to do this via IIS and I tried to do a redirect from index.asp to www.lucid8.com but that does not work because www.lucid8.com is pointing to index.asp and so we end up in a circle. So the question is how do I get rid of these duplicate page references without causing problems. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TroyW0 -
How do I fix a 301 Redirect Loop?
Saturday I waas doing some correcting of some duplicate titles, including nofollowing tags, etc. (my main problem was duplicate titles due to tags and categories being indexed). Now this morning I see that one of my pages refuses to load, citing a 301 redirect loop. http://www.incredibleinfant.com/feeding/switching-baby-formula/ Originally, the page was posted under the wrong category. http://www.incredibleinfant.com/uncategorized/switching-baby-formula I resaved it under the correct category (feeding) and now it won't load. Can someone help me figure out how to correct this mess? Thanks so much Heather
Technical SEO | | Gotmoxie0 -
301 Redirect with an Exact Domain name Match
My Client had a site that ranked for a pretty competitive two word phrase, but for a variety of reasons had to transfer the site to a different domain name (with none of the previous keywords). We've 301'd everything just fine to the new site, but our traffic for that two word phrase, as well as related long tail traffic, is beginning to drop. Could the drop be related to something that we didn't do well in the transfer? Or is it due to the new domain name now not being an exact match? Sitenote question: Our Google Analytics is still set up for the former domain name and shows data just fine. Is there any reason to switch GA to the new domain? What are the pros/cons? Much thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | TrevorMcKendrick0 -
301 Redirect & Cloaking
HEllo~~~~ People. I have a question regarding on cloaking. I will be really greatful if you can help me with question. I have a site www.example.com and it is targeting for multi countries. So I use sub directories for targeting multi countries. e.g. www.example.com/us/ www.example.com/de/ www.example.com/hk/ ....... so on and on. Therefore, when people type www.example.com, I use IP delivery to send users to each coutries. Here is my question. I use 301 redirect for IP delivery, which means when user enter www.example.com, my site read user's IP and send them to right country site by 301 redirect. In this case, is there any possibility that Google considers it as cloaking? Please people.... share me some ideas and thoughs.
Technical SEO | | Artience0 -
301 Redirect "wildcard" question
I have been looking at the SEOmoz redirect guide for some advice but I can't seem to find the answer : http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection I have lots of URLs from a previous version of a site that look like the following: sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=2d&page=1 sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=3a&page=1 etc etc. I want to write a redirect so whenever a URL with the terms "-c-25.html" is requested it redirects to a specified page, regardless of what comes after the question mark. These URLs were created by our previous ecommerce software. The 'c' is for category, and each page of the cateogry created a different URL. I want to do these so I can rediect all of these URLs to the appropraite new cateogry page in a single redirect. Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | craigycraig0