Best Way To Handle 301 Redirect

purchased an established domain - need to redirect old pages to homepage ..

[Chef_Brian]

Hello Every,

Say I was wondering what the best and most straight forward method would be for redirecting about 100 "old" pages address to my homepage of the new site I will be working.

I purchased an established "domain" with some solid inbound links to pages that no longer exists ... and don't want to manually have to 301 each and every old address.

Is their a simply way to "catch all" ....?

Thanks for the help and ideas,

Brian

[g1smd]

Use the standard 301 ModRewrite redirect code that gets published several times per month in this forum, but omit the $1 element from it. The $1 adds the original folder and filename path back on to the new URL. Omitting it causes all requests to be redirected to the root of the new domain.

I must say, though, that I find the idea of saying that 100 pages have moved to one just one single place a tad distasteful. Usually I am doing a one-to-one mapping from one domain to another, preserving the original folder and file names in the redirect. That can be done with just two lines of code in the .htaccess file.

[Chef_Brian]

Let me clarify:

I am building a new site on an old domain, so I will not be using a 301 to point to a new domain.

Rather I am simply building a new site on an older domain that used to have a website. The domain has lots of inbound links and I don't want to loose any links once the new site is up and running.

I would like to be able to "save" any inbound links that the domain currently has, at the same time I would like to try to keep in googles good graces ....

What is my best bet?

Thanks ...

Bj

[jdMorgan]

You best bet to stay in good graces is to 301 redirect only pages which have an on-topic, makes-sense, direct and complete replacement page in your new site. The others should return a 410-Gone response or a 404-Not Found response, and lead the visitor to a custom error page which clearly (and somewhat apologetically) explains that the page is gone (or missing), and offers links to your home page, site map, search facility, and/or category pages (as applicable).

In Google's eyes, only those pages that actually replace the pages on the old site 'deserve' to retain their links; For the good of the Web, links should land on pages that fit the context and description of the links that point to them. In addition, redirecting a bunch of URLs to the exact same page puts you in jeopardy of tripping a duplicate-content filter. The search engines want one and only one unique URL per page of content, and see anything more as a waste of their time and resources... They act accordingly, applying filters, -30 'penalties', and other such measures as they see fit. They do 'forgive' a few multiple URLs --as they must because of messy, badly-constructed but still-useful sites-- but if you exceed whatever this month's threshold is, beware.

Jim

[g1smd]

Of course, above all else, try to retain the same URLs for as many pages as possible, but only where the new content is in some way related to that page name.