Redirecting the home page to new site

301 redirect for the home page of a website

[Daveyboy33]

Hello,
I wondered if anyone might be kind enough to help with this issue, which I feel that I might be overcomplicating a little.

Suppose I have a website and I've moved it to a new domain name, but in the move I've renamed some of the pages since the old page names were not very well thought out.

Since the page structure is different I can't just redirect the whole site since I might have:

oldsite.com/oldpagename.html redirecting to newsite.com/newpagename.html

Redirecting the inner pages is easy enough with a straightfoward 301 redirect, but the thing I'm struggling with is how do you redirect the home page of the old site to the home page of the new site?

Do I just do a 301 redirect for index.html to the homepage of the new site?

Also, if this is what you do, how would you redirect the home page if it was say a wordpress site where you don't have an index.html file?

Many thanks in advance.

Dave

[Daveyboy33]

PS

I forgot to mention - the thing thats confusing me with this is that the site hasn't ever had mod rewrite used to stop the issue with:

oldsite.com and oldsite.com/index.html both appearing.

So I'm confused as to whether redirecting index.html will just redirect the /index.html version above.

Thanks.

[g1smd]

Redirect the old site www and non-www URLs for both / and /index.html to www.example.com/ at the new site.

RewriteRule ^(index\.html)?$ http://www.example.com/? [R=301,L]

The Redirect also removes any parameter string data appended to the old URLs too.

You don't need to think about "files" here. The redirect deals with URL requests coming from the browser. If a certain URL is requested, the redirect is invoked to tell the browser to go request a different URL. For this request the server never gets as far as looking at any files inside the server.

[edited by: g1smd at 9:59 am (utc) on Jun 18, 2010]

[Daveyboy33]

"Redirect the old site www and non-www URLs for both / and /index.html to www.example.com/ at the new site.

RewriteRule ^(index.html)?$ http://www.example.com/? [R=301,L] "

Hello, thanks for your help.

So the code above will do that and in effect solve the problem?

And for the other pages I'd just use a 301 redirect as usual too?

Thanks again,
Dave

[g1smd]

Use

RewriteRule

for all of the rules.

If you use RewriteRule (for either redirects or rewrites) then never mix that with Redirect or RedirectMatch directives on the same site.

[Daveyboy33]

Right thanks.

Am I right in thinking that for the other pages then I'd put:

RewriteRule ^(oldpagename.html)?$ http://www.example.com/newpagename.html [R=301,L]

Thank you

[g1smd]

No, for those you omit the ( ) and ? as they are only needed on the index.html rule.

For the original index.html rule the ( ) ? syntax allowed a match for /index.html and for / requests too.

If you use ( ) ? again, you'd have a second rule that was trying to match requests for / again.

Don't forget to escape the literal reriod in your regular expression pattern.

[Daveyboy33]

Don't forget to escape the literal reriod in your regular expression pattern. :o

Sorry, I don't understand what that means at all, I'm not so hot with this stuff.

Would you mind explaining please?

Should it be:

RewriteRule ^oldpagename.html$ http://www.example.com/newpagename.html [R=301,L] or something else?

Many Thanks, sorry for being a pest.

Thanks,
Dave

[g1smd]

The pattern

^page[b].[/b]html$

will match

page[b].[/b]html

and

page[b]Z[/b]html

and

page[b]5[/b]html

as the "dot" matches "any single character".

If you want to match the literal

page.html

then you need

page[b]\[/b].html

in your pattern. The pattern now matches

page "DOT" html

only.

Escaping is only needed in your patterns. It is never needed in the target filepath or target URL.

[Daveyboy33]

Thank you very much g1smd, you are a star!

Kind Regards,
Dave