.htaccess when integrating one website into another

[AndrewAkesson]

My client would like to integrate one of it's smaller websites into its main website.

I've identified around 20 pages which I'd like to 301 redirect to specific pages on the main website, and this is simple enough.

The problem I have is that I am not sure how I can then put a catch-all to redirect all other pages on the site to the homepage of the main website.

I'd originally though something like this would work:

redirect 301 / http://www.mainwebsite.com/ (catch-all)
redirect 301 /about.asp http://www.mainwebsite.com/about (specific redirect 1)
redirect 301 /latest.asp http://www.mainwebsite.com/news (specific redirect 1)
etc.

Any ideas?

[MulberrySqCraig]

You should be able to achieve what you want by redirecting 404s. You can do this by adding the following to your .htaccess

ErrorDocument 404 /homepage.html

Where homepage.html is the address of your homepage.

What would be better really though is to land them on a an actual 404 page that explains that the page doesn't exist anymore and gives them options of where to go next. Include direct links to the most popular content on the site.

[AndrewAkesson]

Just had a eureka moment with the issue as above!

All that was needed was a .htaccess on the old site like this:

Redirect 301 / http://www.newsite.com/

This attempts to pass a user/crawler to the equivalent page on the new site (which doesn't exist), so this is then handled with a .htaccess on the new site which then redirects to the new versions of those pages:

Redirect 301 /about.asp http://www.newwebsite.com/about (specific redirect 1) Redirect 301 /latest.asp http://www.newwebsite.com/news (specific redirect 1)

Simples!