Old domain to new with 301

[margegunderson]

We have recently moved on to a new server setup with a new domain. The old domain has been re-pointed to the IP addy of our new server.

I would like to have all access requests for the old domain's pages to point to the homepage of the new domain. Is the following two lines of code the best way to achieve the desired results:

Redirect 301 http://www.olddomain.co.uk/* http://www.newdomain.co.uk/
Redirect 301 http://olddomain.co.uk/* http://www.newdomain.co.uk/

[edited by: jdMorgan at 2:59 pm (utc) on Dec. 28, 2007]
[edit reason] De-linked example URLs. [/edit]

[coopster]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, margegunderson.

point to the homepage of the new domain

... any request beginning with URL-Path will return a redirect request to the client at the location of the target URL. Additional path information beyond the matched URL-Path will be appended to the target URL.

Resource: [httpd.apache.org...]

If the site structure has not changed and it is merely a different domain, you may want to consider RedirectMatch [httpd.apache.org] and bring them to the same content page on the new domain by using the captured matching patterns. If you truly want them to go to the homepage, just don't use the pattern in the target URL.

[jdMorgan]

Redirecting many pages to one page creates the appearance of "doorway pages" -- See comments in this recent thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

Jim

[margegunderson]

Thanks for the response. Unfortunately the structure of the old site in no way correlates to that of the new. Also the old site has been decommissioned to the extent that I have no knowledge whatsoever of the old sitemap.

What would you recommend as the best way for us to retain any traffic to the old site without offending SEs.

I am also aware that it is not a good idea to have too many domain names pointing to the same server IP address. However, I don't know any better way to retain the residual value from our old domain.

[jdMorgan]

> Also the old site has been decommissioned to the extent that I have no knowledge whatsoever of the old sitemap.
Hopefully, someone got fired for that -- It's a rather serious mistake...

> What would you recommend as the best way for us to retain any traffic to the old site without offending SEs.
I stand by the recommendations in the cited thread -- Although you may also wish to provide a per-domain "replacement home page" for each old domain, explaining what happened to it, and providing appropriate links for visitors who encounter those pages.

For future reference, see this article [w3.org] by one of the inventors of the World-Wide-Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Jim

[coopster]

Page by page. During the "rewrite" or reorganization it would have wise to keep a chart of oldpage<-->newpage relationships and write your redirects during that phase of development and then of course you could test it as well to be certain you had the redirect properly constructed, no typos, etc. I would still do so before a go live if you truly desire to hang onto that linkjuice.

[margegunderson]

Its too late for that I'm afraid. I've come into the project way beyond that point. Plus the sites are/were too large to begin somekind of mapping now.

Should we just bin the old domain?

[jdMorgan]

Avoid what is "easy" and consider that the loss of your old URLs may cause your rankings to suffer badly for up to a year -- Decisions should be based on that potential loss of traffic/revenue, not on what is easy to do. You may in fact be able to research the old domains' URL-space using the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine" to view the old site's archived pages (if this archiving was permitted). Using that information, reconstruction of the old sites' important URL-mappings might be possible, and that info could be used to generate a 'map' for redirecting those old URLs which pass the most PageRank to the new URLs.

Jim

[wilderness]

Unfortunately the structure of the old site in no way correlates to that of the new. Also the old site has been decommissioned to the extent that I have no knowledge whatsoever of the old sitemap.

In many intances archive.org may well be your friend.

[g1smd]

Don't go for easy. You'll get no traffic or benefit from it.

Don't bin the old domain. It has incoming links and traffic.

You might be able to segment the redirection by topic or category.

[margegunderson]

Thanks for the information. I'll try to gather as much information as I can and redirect the most valuable links.

Is there something I should do to ensure a catch-all so any other (minor) links are 301 redirected to our front page?

[coopster]

Match your other "known" links first, put your catch-all at the end. An option I would consider would be a custom

410 Gone

rather than push them to the homepage -- for the reasons described earlier (see the thread cited in jdMorgan's first post).

[margegunderson]

Could someone give me the correct syntax for my 301 redirect.

EG, is this correct?

Redirect 301 olddomain.co.uk/example1.html http://www.newdomain.co.uk/examples/example1.html

[coopster]

Not quite, see the Redirect documentation cited earlier in this thread.

The old URL-path is a case-sensitive (%-decoded) path beginning with a slash.

[g1smd]

I rarely use anything other than RewriteRule and RewriteCond type processes.

I get a lot more control, but might lose some server efficiency in the process.