Htaccess 301s to 3 different sites

[ellenru]

Hi,

I'm an htaccess newbie, and I have to redirect and split traffic to three new domains from site A.

The original home page has most of the inbound links so I've set up a 301 that goes to site B, the new corporate domain.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Brand websites C and D need 301s for their folders in site A but I have no idea how to write that in relationship to the first redirect, which really is about the home page, contact and only a few other pages.

The urls are duplicates except for the new domain names. They're all on Linux..Site A is about 150 pages, should I write it by page, or can I do some kind of catch all (the first 301) plus the two folders?

I'd really appreciate any insight you have and especially if you can show me how to write it.

Thanks

[YannickVeys]

Hi Ellen,

If you only wanted to redirect all the url's in a certain subdirectory to the new site (not 1-on1), your redirect would look something like this:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/subdirectory/$ http://www.websiteB.com/

But... I dont think you want to do that (Or should do that...) I think you should want to redirect all pages in the subdirectory to their corresponding url on websiteB.

What I mean by that is: you should redirect all your pages 1-on1, like this:

Redirect: www.websiteA.com/subdirectory/url1.html to its equivalent on website B's url: www.websiteB.com/url1.html

If you want to do that, you can. But the url's have to be the same. You can do something like:

RedirectMatch 301 /subdirectory/(.*) http://www.websiteB.com/$1

If the url's change, than you have to do more manual work. You should always try to redirect as many pages 1on1 as you can. Especially the ones that receive external links. The new pages will be almost as "juicy" as the old pages, because the 301 redirect passes the linkjuice along. (not all of it though, but like 90% - 99%)

Is this pushing you a bit in the right direction?

[ellenru]

Thanks Yannick

I'm tracking with you except I have to make the subfolders go not to site B, but new sites...C and D. So can I do it like this:

RedirectMatch 301 /subdirectory/(.*) http://www.websiteC.com/$1

and then

RedirectMatch 301 /subdirectory/(.*) http://www.websiteD.com/$1

The urls match. But the subfolder pages have very few links so I'm less concerned about link juice then just getting the indexing to avoid a bunch of 404s.

The subdirectories on site A got split into 2 freestanding domains for "branding"....and have added a bunch of new pages that don't correspond to the old folder (though some do). They also moved from drupal to WP and I wonder if I need the old htaccess instructions for drupal ? We're keeping the old site in place for a while during  the migration.

Thanks so much again for the reply

[YannickVeys]

RedirectMatch 301 /subdirectoryA/(.*) http://www.websiteB.com/$1

and

RedirectMatch 301 /subdirectoryB/(.*) http://www.websiteC.com/$1

Otherwise it wont work

About the htaccess from the old site... As long as Website A (the old site) is still up and the redirects on that site is properly set up in the htaccess on that server, I don't see any reason to also use it on the new sites.

[ellenru]

Greatness. Thanks!

[YannickVeys]

You're welcome! Hope everything works out!

Test a few URL's first. Or even better: setup a small test case to make sure it works!

[ellenru]

Yannick, it worked like a charm to all three new sites. Great info, thank you for taking the time to help me out.

[YannickVeys]

You are most welcome! Appreciate your feedback that it worked!