Best way to redirect 3 sites to 1 new one.

[EclipseLegal]

Hi All

We currently have 3 old sites that have tones of content. Due to brand/business consolidation we have merge all 3 to produce 1 website. The new site contains all the old content from the old 3.

So, I know I need to 301 redirect all the old content from the previous sites to the equivelent content on the new sites but am confused how you do this with 3 domains?

One of the domains is being replaced with the new site.

So I have:

www.domain1.co.uk

www.domain2.co.uk

www.domain3.co.uk

All the content for all the sites have been imported into a new site and any duplicate content issues havce been resolved.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks

[EclipseLegal]

I should add that one of the sites is hosted with a blogging platform (blog harbour) thats about to shut down therefore I can't upload a htaccess with redirects in. So I was just going to point the domain at the new domain name and add redirects to a htaccess file on the new domains like:

On new domains .htaccess:

redirect 301 www.olddomain.co.uk/category/article.php www.newdomain.co.uk/category/article.php.

Is this the best way?

[AlanMosley]

I would point all the domains at the new domain.

Then have a rule that states, if the host does not equal new domain then make sure it does. see code below. But put this last. as it is only good for links that have the same path as the old site, like the home page and any others you managed to keep the same path

Above this redirect i would redirect to deep pages that do not have the same path, by checking the existing path of the link. This way you dont have chain redirects

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.newdomain.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

but having said this,

First i would not do this all at the same time, SE will discount your redirects if you redirect too many domains to the one domain. there is a matt cutts video about this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a70ygsHgvMw

Also, you do not redirect content, you redirect links. the important thing is the page the link comes from and the link text, the page it did link to is irelevant, then decide on that where to send it. so if no links to the old page there is no link juice to redirect.

Do not send all to the home page, they will be discounted if you do

[EclipseLegal]

Hi Thanks for the reply.

Ok, so use the redirect code you provided at the end of the htaccess. I'm not sure I follow what you mean about redirecting links not content, I'm not talking about external links purely just about any old content from the old domains that may show in serps and getting these redirected to their new versions on the new site.

A clearer example of what I have is:

Old domains each cover one brand

www.brand1.com

www.brand2.com

www.brand3.com

So the new site is structured like:

www.newsite.com/brand1

www.newsite.com/brand3

www.newsite.com/brand3

So how do I handle the redirects from old pages? Like this?

redirect 301 www.brand1.com/some-page www.newsite/brand1/some-page/

Then use your redirect code last? Also the site structure (as above) is totally different than before so would that effect your redirect code?

To make it trickier one of the sites is a hosted blog platform that I dont have ftp access to but I can repoint the domain. I could repoint this domain to new hosting with a page saying moved and have a .htaccess under that domain doing the redirects.

[EclipseLegal]

Also, any pointers on how to achieve this?

"Above this redirect i would redirect to deep pages that do not have the same path, by checking the existing path of the link. This way you dont have chain redirects"

[AlanMosley]

When you do a redirect, all you do is redirect requests for that page.

So when the search engine follows a link, it is redirected to another page, and it gives the link juice to that page. you do not redirect content or any thing else about the page but its incomming links, so if there is no links pointing to the site, there is nothing to redirect.

when you do a 301 redirect you are redirecting links, the page that link comes from and the link text should be relevant to the new page.

[EclipseLegal]

I understand, I didn't actually mean redirect content as such but I realise I was a little unclear in my questions.

So basically I should point all 3 domains to the new one then redirect-wise, is the below correct?

redirect 301 http://www.oldsite.com/some-category/article/ http://www.newsite.com/category/article