Another 301 redirect question

[georgec]

Hi:
My site currently has two domains pointing to it (with no redirection) due to the fact that I changed domains a few years ago, and still have sites linking to it using the old domain. The problem is, Google frequently switches between the two domains when indexing. Now the familar question- what should I put in a .htaccess file to do a 301 redirect to the exact same page on the current domain when the old is typed? I've tried the code:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.olddomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [newdomain.com...] [R=301,L]

though a couple of problems:

1) If "www" is not typed, I don't get the redirection (ie: [olddomain.com...]

2) Even if I type the old domain corrrectly (ie: (http://www.olddomain.com/apage.com), all I get now is actually a redirect to a 404 page not found error.

Any help would be great. Thanks,

[jdMorgan]

To fix your "missing www" problem, just make the www. optional in the RewriteCond:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?olddomain\.com [NC]

I don't know why your "correctly-requested" page is going 404 -- The RewriteRule looks OK. You might want to take a look at your server error log to see where it redirected to. There may be some problem in httpd.conf or in your "control panel" that is causing this.

Jim

[georgec]

Hi jdMorgan:
Thanks for the help. No idea why my server redirects to a 404 error instead. I guess it's something specific to my server, though I know mod_rewrite does work on it, since I use it to disable hotlinking on my site. Hmmm...

[jdMorgan]

take a look at your server error log

Jim