I have a bunch of sites I am migrating from frontpage to joomla. They are low traffic/low revenue sites.
Under fp, the urls were something like www.example.com/widget.htm. Under joomla, they are www.example.com/index.php/widget.html.
Many of these sites are on a shared virtual host and I have banged my head against the wall getting an htaccess rewrite to work. All I'm looking for is something simple to redirect people who are following old links to my index page.
I created a file called 404.html and put it in the root. That has a meta refresh to www.example.com.
However, I think I need to do some sort of return code that says that the page they originally were looking for is no longer available because what I am doing would probably return a 200 (found) code.
I was wondering if the following PHP code might be a better way of doing things
<?php
// Permanent redirection
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.example.com/");
exit();
?>
I'd appreciate any thoughts on this. All I'm trying to do is to make the transition smoother and save some of the traffic while the search engines figure out the new site.
chris
[edited by: phranque at 5:24 am (utc) on May 3, 2010]
[edit reason] exemplified urls [/edit]
