What's the appropriate re-direct method?

domain etiquette

[Jimb0]

We just bought a new domain. I know the proper procedure to re-direct traffic from my old site to my new site. The previous owner of the site we just purchased asked if there is a way to send their old traffic to their new site. I figured we can post a banner on our home page for a month, but I don't want it to look tacky. What do most webmasters do in this case? Is there a way to detect the google key term so the banner only appears when the user types in a keyterm that is obviously for the previous owner?

thanks,

[lucy24]

Is there a way to detect the google key term so the banner only appears when the user types in a keyterm that is obviously for the previous owner?

Mechanically this is easy, but in practice I don't see how it can work.

If anyone arrives via keywords that point to your own site, it can only be because search engines have indexed the domain as it now exists, to there will no longer be any results for the old site.

Seems like what you'd really want to look out for is people coming in with no referer. Those are your bookmarks and type-ins who know the domain from before.

What about other referers? If there's no overlap between the previous owner's links and your own links, you can do the banner or redirect for anyone coming in from the old site's main referers. Also anyone asking for specific pagenames that you've no longer got. Your 404 page could have a section for "Are you looking for the widget store? They've changed their name to example dot com."

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld, Jimb0!


i would not do any links from your new site or redirects.
if there is a specifically defined list or identifiable pattern of urls from the previous site that don't conflict with your new urls, you could do as lucy24 suggested and provide a 404 or 410 status code and a custom error document for those requests if possible.

if you are on an apache server you could probably do this all in .htaccess using the [G] flag for the RewriteRule directive and limiting the ErrorDocument directive within a Location or LocationMatch container.