Best Approach to Redirect One Domain to Another

[RPD]

So I'm about to migrate one domain to another.  Lets say I'm migrating boo.com to foo.com.  Boo.com has good organic traffic & has some really well ranked pages.  For this reason (I think) I want to send that traffic to some where other than the foo.com homepage.  Perhaps a catered landing page.  My question is can I redirect some of the specific pages on boo.com to a landing page on foo.com & then redirect the delta to foo.com's homepage? Or am a risking not fully transferring the full credit of one domain to another if I take that approach & therefore I should just redirect one domain to the other in its entirety?

Thanks,

Rich

[FedeEinhorn]

Hmm... my best guess is that if the content remains the same, that means that you have the same contents on boo.com and foo.com, then just simply do a page by page redirection, that will carry as many value as possible to the new pages.

However, you if you do not have the same pages available on both domains, then there are a couple of things you can do:

• Not the exact same content on the new domain: redirect to what you think is the best match.
• No similar content on the new domain:
                                                         - Option 1: Redirect to a page (sort of a landing page) showing similar pages that the user might be interested in.
                                                         - Option 2: Redirect to a landing page or homepage.

Hope that helps!

[TomVolpe]

Hi Rich,

Elaborating on FedeEinhorn’s answer, if the page structure is the same you could just redirect all requests to the same URI on your new domain, as he stated. You could do this very easily with a .htaccess file on the root folder of your old domain (providing you’re running an apache webserver like most people). To redirect using regular expressions and capture groups we can use the RedirectMatch directive, which would look like this:

RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.newsite.com$1

As simple as that, you’ve redirected all existing pages to the same page on the new domain. If you haven't used this before, here's a brief look at how that works for you:

Firstly, RedirectMatch simply tells apache we’re using the RedirectMatch directive from mod_alias.

301 specifies a 301 SEO friendly redirect which passes all that lovely SEO juice to your new site.

^(.*)$ is our regular expression. It states, from the start of the requested URI (^) start capturing the request (using the brackets to show what we want to capture), capture it all (with . meaning any character or symbol and the * meaning 0 or more of the preceding . , which will lead to everything being caught by our capture group (the brackets). And the $ meaning the end of the requested URI.

The final part of this redirect is specifying the page to redirect to, but as we have captured the request in the previous part, we use $1 to append our first capture (only capture in this distance) to the end of our new domain.

If you have completely changed your site, you may wish to redirect all requests to your homepage or another page, it is as easy as modifying the previous code to redirect without appending our capture to the end of your redirection target, so this would be acceptable:

RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.newsite.com

But since we don’t need to use anything from the requested URI, we should really remove the brackets (the capture group) for the sake of tidiness, resulting in:

RedirectMatch 301 ^.*$ http://www.newsite.com

You could use a mixture of these 2 code, for instance if your blog posts are all identical but your main site pages have all changed - this code would redirect all pages starting with /blog/ to their double on the new domain, but redirect all other pages to a /we-have-moved/ landing page:

RedirectMatch 301 ^(/blog/.*)$ http://www.newsite.com$1

RedirectMatch 301 ^.*$ http://www.newsite.com/we-have-moved/

Hope that's useful,

Tom