Best way to take down my website

[kkobashi]

No, not in the malicious way.

One of my sites that has been on the net for nearly 5 years is growing old and tired and I want to change its focus. Whats the best way to take down a site gracefully?

When users surf to my pages in the search indexes/bookmarks, what can I do in .htaccess to make them go to my home page and let the search engines/users know the other pages no longer exist?

I tried this but got an internal server error:
RewriteRule (.*) [site.com...] [R=410,L]

[ogletree]

You want to set it up so that all the pages are 301ed to the root not root/index.htm

I'm not sure the code you need for that.

[Swanny007]

Are you going to redirect the site to a new URL or just the old site's home page? I had a site I took down. I just 301'd it to another site I run. The topic was a bit different but I did it that way so I didn't totally lose the visitors.

[kkobashi]

Hey guys, thanks for the replies.

I want to maintain the existing website domain name. Basically I want Google/Yahoo/etc. to know that all my pages are dead and gone. However, for the pages that are dead, I don't want to lose that visit and send them to my home page.

[kkobashi]

I'm thinking this should work. Anything typed in gets redirected 301 to index.html:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on

# Set the default handler
DirectoryIndex index.html

# Add the www if missing
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [%{HTTP_HOST}...] [R=301,L]

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9-]+)/?$ [mysite.com...] [R=301,L,NC]

Thoughts appreciated!