I have a bit of a complex question. I am moving sites from
http://www.hikingsanfrancisco.com
to
http://www.comehike.com
The directory structures will not be the same throughout both sites. What are some of the best practice things I can do in order to retain most of my existing SEO strength in both the general domain and individual pages for searches related to the other pages?
Thank you,
Alex
If most of the URLs are staying the same and just the domain is changing, you could create an .htaccess file in the root folder at the old site with the following:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.comehike.com/$1 [R=301,L]
This will make hikingsanfrancisco.com/some-page go to comehike.com/some-page.
Otherwise in that same htaccess file you could add a line for each redirect. So if hikingsanfrancisco.com/big-hikes is now going to comehike.com/even-bigger-hikes the redirect would look like:
Redirect 301 /big-hikes http://www.comehike.com/even-bigger-hikes
That 301 tells Google to now consider the new URL correct.
To redirect the whole site no matter what to the new URL you could use this:
Redirect 301 / http://www.comehike.com/
A 301 Redirect, page by page, is the best option (If you can use regular expressions is easier). Redirect the old page to a page in the new site with similar content.
Use the change of address tool in Google Webmasters tools.
Try to contact some of yours referrals to change the links that target your site.
Related
I searched stackoverflow but couldn't find a solution that fits my need. On top of it, if must admit, that regex is a pretty difficult thing for me. So here is the thing:
I have a new webshop (domain-new.com) that has basically the same products of old shop (weird product urls, weird categories, everything weird, ...) but on a new technology, new domain and proper URLs. Thus, I would like to close the old shop and transfer the SEO rankings with a 301 redirect to the new domain/shop.
My solution is that the old shop/domain serves a .htaccess file with a lot of links:
RewriteEngine On
Redirect 301 / http://www.domain-new.com/ ###front page
Redirect 301 old-weird-product-path1 http://www.domain-new.com/new-product1.html
Redirect 301 old-weird-product-path2 http://www.domain-new.com/new-product2.html
Redirect 301 old-weird-product-path3 http://www.domain-new.com/new-product3.html
Redirect 301 old-weird-product-path4 http://www.domain-new.com/new-product4.html
I could manage to link about 300 products and categories but can't manage to do the hole list of 5000 products and categories.
Is there a way to add a line of code that says: "and for everything else, thats not listed above, redirect to the front page of the new webshop?
Thanks in advance and sorry, if the question was answered somewhere else. I couldn't find the proper solution.
This may be possible with regex match if you have a common pattern in weird urls.
Then Regex not match common url pattern and redirect to home page of new website something like
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule [^old-weird-product-path] http://www.domain-new.com/ [R=301,L]
You may have to refine it as per url structure.
I have a custom made image gallery site that I converted to WordPress, this site have few thousands link like this
http://www.example.net/Gallery?cmd=viewCarGallery&carID=13&pgID=1
http://www.example.net/Gallery?cmd=viewCarGallery&carID=9&pgID=1
All link is now converted to wordpress and now I am facing problem redirect them, I tried to using like this
Redirect 301 /Gallery?cmd=viewCarGallery&carID=9&pgID=1 http://www.example.net/gallery/gallery_ID
Please help me how can I redirect this kind of URL.
A permanent 301 redirect in your .htaccess file lets search engines and others know that an old link has been replaced by a new one. It's the recommended method for directing traffic from an existing page.I added below codes in my .htaccess file.
Redirect 301 /oldfile.htm /newfile.htm
I think what you need is mod rewrite. Take a look here http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/modrewrite-tips-tricks.html
It looks like a similar question https://superuser.com/questions/155139/htaccess-301-redirect-with-regular-expressions
Suppose I have an old website with 10 webpages, and I want to deprecate it and move visitors to a new website with 100 webpages.
Two of the webpages of the old website map directly to two corresponding webpages on the new website. All other pages on the old website should go to the new website's home page. How to set that up?
I know I can use .htaccess in the public_html folder of the old website to create some permanent redirect rules for individual pages. So for the two pages that need to map one-to-one, I can do:
Redirect 301 /oldfile1.htm http://www.example.net/newfile1.htm
Redirect 301 /def/oldfile2.htm http://www.example.net/123/456/newfile2.htm
But what about all the other webpages on the old website? This is where my knowledge of .htaccess lacks. Does the .htaccess stop executing when it reaches one of the redirects above? If so, then perhaps I simply place the following AFTER the above code to catch the remaining pages?
Redirect 301 / http://www.example.net/
Or, something else? Also, will the redirect directly above map all webpages it sees to the home page of the new website (I assume so), or a matching directory/webpage page on the new website? -- That is, I don't want the situation where http://www.olddomain.com/abc/Oldfile1234.html takes users to http://www.example.net/abc/Oldfile1234.html on the new website (rather, it should take users to http://www.example.net) since most webpages do not map one-to-one.
Lastly, in the .htaccess file on the old website public_html directory, how to account for users coming from https versus http, and www versus non-www URLs?
I'm hoping there's common strategy people use for this sort of thing, since it should be fairly common, so I don't have to re-invent one.
You should be using RedirectMatch for precise matching using regular expressions. You can place these rules in root .htaccess:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/oldfile1\.htm$ http://www.example.net/newfile1.htm
RedirectMatch 301 ^/def/oldfile2\.htm$ http://www.example.net/123/456/newfile2.htm
RedirectMatch 301 ^ http://www.example.net/
We have created a bunch of landing pages on a Joomla CMS system, such that the URL for each landing page is www.domain.com/page1.html and www.domain.com/page2.html, and so on. Of course the page1.html isn't really an HTML file it is a dynamic CMS page, just rewritten with htaccess.
The goal is to have one of our other domains, something like www.uniquedomain1.com show the content of www.domain.com/page1.html. Or, another domain like www.uniquedomain2.html show the content of www.domain.com/page2.html.
This needs to be search engine friendly so we can't use URL masking. Also we can't use HTACCESS redirects as this actually changes the URL in the browser bar. Need to keep the www.uniquedomain1.com URL in the browser bar.
Tried Apache VirtualHost options without any luck. You can park in a directory but not from a URL.
Ended up parking the domains on one folder, and then creating a PHP script to detect the domain host and then use CURL to query the correct url and deliver content. This whole thing seems ridiculously over complicated, and of course CURL isn't the best option, but it is all we could get to work.
Any thoughts on how to do this, or a better solution?
You can use HTACCESS redirect rules to do it without performing a redirect.
Change the html file names to be the domain name of the desired domain like domain.tld and do something like this in an .htaccess file
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(?:www\.)?([a-z0-9\.-]+\.[a-z]+) [NC]
RewriteRule ^$ /%1.html [L]
A quick test of this worked for two of my test (sub)domains test.domain.tld and test2.domain.tld. Both properly redirected to files with the names test.domain.tld.html and test2.domain.tld.html without modifying the URL.
You could also just use your PHP wrapper script to grab the content of each of the miscellaneous html files and output them.
If you renamed all of your HTML files (as in my previous suggested answer) to be domain.tld.html you could do it fairly easily. Something might look like:
<?php
require($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] .'.html');
I have a web hosting package with 2 domains pointing to it. I've noticed on Google that it has indexed the directory of one of the domains for the other domain. Is there a way of preventing this from happening.
You could try with the Robots exclusion standard but is no guarantee.
Redirect all pages of one of your domains to the other one. You can do that with .htaccess and modRewrite similar to this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
This would perform a 301 redirect (Permanently moved) from example.com to www.example.com.
For SEO purposes you never want to have duplicate content (identical pages on different URLs), there should always be exactly one URL for your content, all other possible URLs should redirect to that one.
Updating your robots.txt will definitely solve the problem in the future, but I think the question you should be asking is, How did Google know those pages were there?
First, you should ensure that a user can't traverse your site's filesystem (if your server is *nix, .htaccess should have something like Options -Indexes). And if you had a public link anywhere that joined the two sites on a single domain, that could be how Google found it. If you are careful to keep your site clean and never point to the files in the other docroot, there should be no problem hosting one domain off the subdirectory of another domain.
You can clear Google's index of those pages by using their Webmaster Tools. In order to identify yourself as the site's owner, you'll need to install a unique file (they create it for you) in the root directory of your various document roots, then you can manually update the parts of your site that they've indexed. This applies only to Google.
If you've been indexed by other search engines (and you probably have been if Google indexed you), you should try to figure out how they got there, fix the problem, move the second site to another folder (causing the pages to report 404 Page Not Found on your main domain) and then get the the search engines to reindex.
If you are using Linux, then some additions to your .htaccess file would probably work, but the specifics would depend on your site setup.