redirection of old domain to new

redirecting legacy links to new site

[saoi_jp]

Two years ago the domain name of a site changed. For two years, I've maintained the previous domain name as a site that auto-forwarded the person to the relevant page of the new site.

I want a service that will redirect any legacy links to a specific url. If someone types in 'www.widget.com/blah/bleat.html' I'd like them to go to a specific page on the new 'www.get-widget.com'

What options are available? Redirecting or forwarding domain names at the new site virtual server only works on the domain level, not the page level. (Pages result in generic 404's.)

[cabbie]

This should help.
[webmasterworld.com...]

[saoi_jp]

Thanks. What I want, though, is a redirect of any www.mydomain.com/page/etc/blah to www.the_new_one.com/page

There are free redirect services, but somehow I can't trust them...why are they free? What do they do, actually, to earn? Hijack affiliate sales on the redirect? etc.

Currently I'm paying $60 / year to physically host my www.oldurl.com and redirect the traffic dynamically. I wondered if there were better options.

[jdMorgan]

saoi_jp,

You can change your old site's dns to point the old domain to the same server (IP address) as the new site. Then you can intercept requests for pages in the old domain, and 301-redirect them to the new pages. This is fairly trivial if your new site is hosted on Apache, but can also be done with IIS. There are several threads here on WebmasterWorld dealing with redirecting subdomains and secondary domain names to the "correct" domain.

HTH,
Jim

[saoi_jp]

Thank you. My hosting service (virtual host) allows redirect but page-specific ones result in generic 404's, beyond my control. Their tech support won't handle it differently. I don't have the server access to implement the solutions I find here. So the course I'll follow is this: maintain the separate server at five bucks a month. Disable the auto-forwarding so the visitors get a custom 404 page. Maintain this until the domain expires. And renew only if I cannot get DMOZ to correct the url. (OT: Niche area, has no editor; I applied 8 months ago, no reply. Ironically I was the one who suggested 9 of the 20 sites in the category.)