Writing useful comments on well trusted blogs obviously give you some sort of juice, even when the link are nofollow. Google surely recognize a link in a blog comment, I don't think he cares much about the rel attribute anymore, much more about the blog metrics and the comment quality.

Have you looked into the server activity log ? You may check the referer, the IP used and more. If this is a well done DDoS your servers should be down. Check the traffic : does the increase is a direct traffic ? Does it comes from search results or referring sites ?

A DDoS has only one goal and will probably use a direct request. I doubt this is the case for your site.

You should get all the url of the old site with Xenu's Link Sleuth, then create a PHP array of oldUrl => newUrl and put it in your redirect script.

So you have in the htaccess :

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}  ^/home/newscontent.asp
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} id=([0-9]+)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ redirect.php?id=%1 [L]

In the redirect.php file, you have :

$redirect = array("/home/newscontent.asp?id=1133" => "/name-of-the-article"); // 800 times (for all url)

if(isset($redirect[$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']])) {
    header("Status: 301 Moved Permanently", false, 301);
    header("Location: http://www.mydomain.com/".$redirect[$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']]);
    exit();
}

// Send a 404 if you don't have a redirect

YSlow for firebug is very useful, don't forget to run SmushIt (Tools in YSlow) to have optimized images. Spites + GZip + 1 single packed CSS + 1 single packed JS + expires headers are very effective. Use media domain if you have a lot of pictures on the page.

See the real load time in the Net tab of firebug as Gary said.

As you have only 800 urls, I agree with Damien, you should generate an associative array in pure php, associating every ID with the new url.

The redirect script will only test if the ID is an array key, if it is you 301 to the new url. Otherwise, display a 404 page.

To be clear about the different roles of the files in my solution, the .htaccess file will redirect every old url (whatever the id is) to a redirect script written in php.

This script will get the old url Id, load the article (to get the article name) and then redirect 301 to the new url. Only in php can you access the database.

Damien gave another solution, only based on htaccess. You have to write (or generate with code / software) 800 redirect directive for the htaccess file.

Can you be a bit more precise about the new url ? Does every old article with id has to 301 to a page with a unique name ?

This is not a normal behavior, you should respond to robots.txt, put the sitemap link in there or simply :

User-agent: *
Disallow:

The actual robots.txt gives :

GET robots.txt 302 Found, which redirects to :

GET 404error.html 200 Ok, which redirect to the home with browser behavior :

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=/">

You better change this to a normal response

That's right but htaccess was asked. Thumbed up your answer so it goes first

True ! The good syntax is :

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}  ^/home/newscontent.asp
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} id=([0-9]+)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ redirect.php?id=%1 [L]

Hi mozllo,

You won't be able to create a .htaccess for such urls, because the original url only has the ID of the article and you want the name of the article in the new url. This requires database access to know the new url.

I would suggest to put in your htaccess file :

RewriteRule ^home/newscotnent.asp?id=([0-9]+) redirect.php?id=$1 [L]

Edit : see good rule below

The redirect.php file will load the article (or category as I understood) and do a 301 to the new url.

Multiple K, you will have to dig into SEOMoz tools, various SEO tools to get site history and see what was the site in waybackmachine.

I can't give any advice on the time it will take, this depends on so much parameters, before you buy it and after you buy it !

Depends on the price, if it is affordable you should buy it and work on it to get the reputation back, even if it takes time.

If you want to make visits ASAP, I wouldn't recommend to buy a banned domain.