Moving a web site to another server

Is there any way to have traffic redirected to my new site?

[KG2RG]

Moving a web site to another server and will be using a new URL. I will be terminating the old host and URL. The old URL will be closed but will still get hits from search engines, surfers bookmarks and so on. Is there any way to have that traffic redirected to my new site? I have seen pages on the internet that said, "We have moved, please stand by while you are redirected" Is there a way to do this?

[msr986]

Do you own the old URL?

[KG2RG]

Yes, but this site was in a subdirectory of the old site. www.site1.com/site2/

I need the traffic from site2 redirected to the new site. I own www.site1.com but it will be parked at the registry and it will URL forward to another site.

I just can not afford to host www.site1.com

[KG2RG]

Attention moderators, I am not spamming the site with www.site1.com, I am only using it as an example. I don't really own www.site1.com, just using it instead of my real site name.

[msr986]

Unfortunately since the traffic goes to a subdirectory of your old URL, you won't be able to forward your traffic unless you have a host for the old URL. Otherwise you could set the DNS record to redirect. I would look into some cheap hosting for the old URL. I've seen ads for sites as cheap as $2.95 or $4.95 a month. Keep it for a couple of months until the search engines pick up the redirect. All you need on the site is a .htaccess file with the appropriate redirect.

OK old man?

[KG2RG]

Yup, that's what I thought. I have a webmasters hosting plan that I just started that lets me host and control up to 10 sites. I have about 4 spots open. I will add www.site1.com to the DNS data base and host it until I have a client who needs that spot. I will have a page redirect www.site1.com/index.html to the appropriate site and I'll create a directory www.site1.com/site2/ I'll have www.site1.com/site2/index.html redirect to the new site and I'll run a custom 404 cgi script, using .htaccess, that will redirect all unfound URLs in that directory to the new site. This is probably the best thing I can do.

PS, we joined webmasterworld at about the same time, only you have been about 3 times as busy as me. Thanks for the reply!

[msr986]

Make it simple, do this instead:

Set up an account for www.site1.com.

Put this in it's .htaccess file:
Redirect permanent /site2 [site2.com...]

Done, you don't need anything else.

This method will also ensure that the bots understand that your site has moved. If you use a custom 404, the search engines will drop you!

[KG2RG]

I tested this out and it did nothing. I put the following in a .htaccess file:

Redirect permanent /site2 [site2.com...]

Then I uploaded it in ACSII next to my index.html on a test site of mine. What am I missing?

[msr986]

First, let's make sure we are on the same wavelength.

I image you have two URL's www.site1.com and www.site2.com.

Now i assume you've developed a new site, and stuck it on the first one as a subdirectory: www.site1.com/newsite.

Now you want www.site1.com to have it's own URL, www.site2.com.

To redirect the content, your .htaccess for www.site1.com for this example should be:

Redirect permanent /newsite [site2.com...]

This .htaccess file should go in the root of www.site1.com

Now when you type in www.site1.com/newsite in the address bar you should be redirected to www.site2.com.

If you type in www.site1.com you will go site1's index.com like usual.

This should be working, is your test set up correctly?

[se4rchsiren]

Hi Guys

I hope you don't mind me jumping on this posting, but I have a similar problem so I thought it might be better if I tagged it on to this

Okay- the site I am working on is currently having a new design plus changes to the directory structure, therefore I need to know the best way to redirect the traffic.

The website is very busy therefore it is sat on a web cluster and load balancing is used to distrube the traffic.

The current website directory structure is for example

www.examplesite.com/directory1/directory2/direcory3/file.htm

the new site will be
www.examplesite.com/directory1/directory2/file.htm

so I need to know the best way to redirect the current listings on the search engines to the new webpages and also make the robots index the new pages with out affecting the website ranking especially on Google, as we have a PR8.

Can you help? :-)

Please let me know
Cheers

[KG2RG]

OK, I know it sounds some what confusing; especially with someone like me explaining it.

There has always been a site 1 with a real domain name. It was a business. But I had allot of extra space on the server to play and experiment with. So I started an entertainment ham radio site in a subdirectory of the site1.com. The ham site I added in the subdirectory we will call site 2. Site 2 was not a .com site, it only lived in the subdirectory of the site1.com. So here is what the URL structure looked like. www.site1.com/site2/

Site2 started out as just an experiment, but after a while, it started getting some heavy traffic. After about 11 months, site 2 had over 1000 pages and was receiving about 7,000 hits a week from search engines, sometimes more. This site also consumed to much space and I felt it was time to get it a real .com name and move it onto it's own server. So I did. I got a .com for it, and put it on its own hosting plan. I emailed the changes to all on the subscription list, and I had all the pages from the old site redirect to the new site by adding this in all the pages:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0; url=http://www.site2.com">

Also, the old site ranked very well and all pages were solid SHTML pages, and were designed to be optimized. Meta tags were well thought out, no spamming, the body was very relevant with key words and key fraises up top with no java covering it. The whole 9 yards. The forum was Iconboard and we used a news publishing CGI script to add the last 5 headlines to the index and build hundreds of articles in the news section of the site. The new site runs entirely in the CGI-BIN. The whole site is one big script. I have no idea if it will do well with the search engines or if they will even index it. So I have also added many of the old pages to the new site with links to the new site and a banner saying, this is the old site. Click here to go to the new site. Maybe these old pages will once again get indexed under their new URL, and get some traffic over to the main part of the site.

So now I must shut down the hosting plan for site1.com . But I can host the site1.com domain on my other server. And if I host site1.com and create a directory the same as it was, www.site1.com/site2/ , the search engine traffic will send it here. That's why I will use a custom 404 to grab the traffic that come to www.site1.com/site2/ , and redirect it to the new site.

[msr986]

KG2RG,

The redirect above will do exactly what you need, but if you're more comfortable with 404 pages, I guess that will work too!

-Marty

[msr986]

se4rchsiren,

With a pr8, I don't know if I'd change a thing!

[KG2RG]

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0; url=http://www.site2.com">

I put this in my .htaccess file and it did nothing. So how does this work.

[jaybee]

Hi KG2RG

I hope the sticky I sent you will help.
jaybee

[DaveAtIFG]

KG2RG, this meta tag
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0; url=http://www.site2.com">
belongs in the <head> section of an HTML document, not in .htaccess

For some introductory information about using mod_rewrite directives in the .htaccess file to rewrite URLs, see message #2 in this thread [webmasterworld.com].

For some information about using mod_alias directives in the .htaccess file to redirect URLs, see the Apache docs [httpd.apache.org].

Mod_alias is less powerful, but easier to use than mod_rewrite. In either case, be sure that the directives you use return a 301 (moved permanently) header with each redirect so the SEs know that they need to update your URLs.