Redirecting after a site move

Worker Joined: Apr 14, 2004 Posts: 193

A couple of months ago, I moved my main site to a new directory while upgrading from phpnuke 6.5 - 7.3. Old site had GT NextGen 0.4a installed and had googlebots crawling every day. They vanished for some reason and after searching Google I found:

Quote:

If we continue to list an 'old' version of your site (i.e. we continue to list [ Only registered users can see links on this board! Get registered or login! ] despite the fact that your site now lives at [ Only registered users can see links on this board! Get registered or login! ] ) you need to update the links that are pointing to the sites. Since our robots jump from page to page via hyperlinks, someone must still be linking to the defunct page. Once others correct their links, we can too. Once your new site is live, you may wish to place a permanent redirect (using a "301" code in HTTP headers) on your old site to inform visitors and search engines that your site has moved.

One way to determine who is linking to the dead site is to try a link search. You can find instructions on how to do this on our features page. Please note that this process does not work for all of the sites in our index.

Well, I had redirected the main page to the new URL but after a search of Google, looking for listed URLS from the old site, I found over 100 indexed using this google search device: http://www.google.co.uk/help/features.html#link

Since there was no way, I was going to spend the time individually redirecting each of those pages, I looked for a way to doing it systematically. I found this page http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm where after reading a bit I found that I could place an .htaccess file in the main directory of the old location with only one redirect that would do the job:

Code:

RewriteEngine On





RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.new.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Voila, my old site was remapped to the new with only two lines of code. I checked a number of the old URLS just to see and they all marvelously were redirected to their proper location on my new site.

One day later, either by coincidence or hopefully through this process, Google returned to my site Smile

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Aug 27, 2002 Posts: 17088

What a great "How To"! Thanks for sharing this Dean!