301 Redirect Subdomain but not folders and files

Looking to redirect main subdomain index but not the rest

[FattyB]

Hi,

I had section on the site sub.domain.com. For years had run tens of thousands of news articles in it. However, we stopped publishing that topic a while ago. We recently moved the site and deleted most of the articles in it as rights ran out. Still a few our staff did, but not many. But a lot of search traffic and links to it and its articles.

I was looking to redirect the old sub.domain.com to domain.com but leave the likes of sub.domain.com/folder/ and sub.domain.com/folder/folder/article.html etc alone.

Is that possible? I thought it would be really spammy to redirect all the sub folders (which all have high rank and inbound) as they are specific things we don't cover anymore.

Thing is I was to delete the whole subdomain it would lead to people ending up on another site as name based. Is it a bad idea to redirect the subdomain at all? Its a big site and the subdomain has a lot of page rank and inbound links from newspapers, bbc etc. Its news.domain so figured OK to redirect that to our main page now.

I tried to do it with

RewriteEngine On

RedirectMatch %{HTTP_HOST} news\.sitename\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://www.sitename.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L,NE]

but that did not work.

Many thanks
James

[g1smd]

The Regex pattern in the Rule can only match the path part of the request.

As this is localised on a per-folder basis the pattern you require here is

^$

RewriteRule ^$ http://www.example.com/ [R=301,L]

[lucy24]

RewriteRule ^$ etcetera

Or, if you want to be really thorough,

RewriteRule ^(index\.html)?$

Is it a bad idea to redirect the subdomain at all?

Why don't you serve a 410 with a nice customized 410 page?

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} news\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !short-list-of-exceptions-here
RewriteRule .? - [G]

The [NE] flag will do no harm, but it isn't needed since nothing in the redirect is escapable anyway. I assume

RedirectMatch

was a typo for

RewriteCond

since it would make no sense (and would probably explode the server) otherwise.

[FattyB]

Thanks very much folks. I've redirect the main and I will 410 the directory index pages. While leaving the articles not deleted in place. So ideal I think.