I am moving my content from one domain to another one. What do I need to add to my .htacces to do a redirect from the current site to the new one' I want that if someone goes for example to www.domain.com/pageb.php they will be redirected to www.domain2.com/pageb.php
Pulled this off the net... How to implement the 301 Redirect 1. To create a .htaccess file, open notepad, name and save the file as .htaccess (there is no extension). 2. If you already have a .htaccess file on your server, download it to your desktop for editing. 3. Place this code in your .htaccess file: redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm 4. If the .htaccess file already has lines of code in it, skip a line, then add the above code. 5. Save the .htaccess file 6. Upload this file to the root folder of your server. 7. Test it by typing in the old address to the page you've changed. You should be immediately taken to the new location. Notes: Don't add "http://www" to the first part of the statement - place the path from the top level of your site to the page. Also ensure that you leave a single space between these elements: redirect 301 (the instruction that the page has moved) /old/old.htm (the original folder path and file name) http://www.you.com/new.htm (new path and file name) When the search engines spider your site again they will follow the rule you have created in your .htaccess file. The search engine spider doesn't actually read the .htaccess file, but recognizes the response from the server as valid. During the next update, the old file name and path will be dropped and replaced with the new one. Sometimes you may see alternating old/new file names during the transition period, plus some fluctuations in rankings. According to Google it will take 6-8 weeks to see the changes reflected on your pages. Other ways to implement the 301 redirect: 1. To redirect ALL files on your domain use this in your .htaccess file if you are on a unix web server: redirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com redirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com You can also use one of these in your .htaccess file: redirect 301 /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html redirect permanent /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html redirectpermanent /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html This will redirect "index.html" to another domain using a 301-Moved permanently redirect. 2. If you need to redirect http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com and you've got mod_rewrite enabled on your server you can put this in your .htaccess file: Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=permanent,L] or this: Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Tip: Use your full URL (ie http://www.domain.com) when obtaining incoming links to your site. Also use your full URL for the internal linking of your site. 3. If you want to redirect your .htm pages to .php pages andd you've got mod_rewrite enabled on your server you can put this in your .htaccess file: RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteRule (.*).htm$ /$1.php 4. If you wish to redirect your .html or .htm pages to .shtml pages because you are using Server Side Includes (SSI) add this code to your .htaccess file: AddType text/html .shtml AddHandler server-parsed .shtml .html .htm Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes DirectoryIndex index.shtml index.html Frequently Asked Question: What's the difference in using a 301 redirect versus a meta redirect? Meta Redirect To send someone to a new page (or site) put this in the head of your document: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10; url=http://mynewsite.com/"> Content="10; tells the browser to wait 10 seconds before transfer, choose however long you would like, you can even choose 0 to give a smoother transition, but some (really old) browsers aren't capable of using this so I'd suggest putting a link on that page to your new site for them. With a meta redirect the page with the redirect issues a 200 OK status and some other mechanism moves the browser over to the new URL. With a 200 OK on both pages, the search engine wants to index both the start page and the target page - and that is a known spam method (set up 10,000 domains full of keywords for the search engines to index then meta redirect the "real visitor" after 0 or 1 seconds to the "real site" ) so using it gets you penalized. The 301 redirect simply issues a Permanently Moved message in the HTTP header which tells the search engine to only index the target URL. Conclusion: The safest way to redirect old web pages to the new pages or old web site to the new web site and keep the same search engine rankings is to use the 301 redirect. It will also pass on the page rank from your old site to your new site.
