Migrating domains from a domain that will have new content.

[CC_Dallas]

We have a new url.  The old url is being taken over by someone else.  Is it possible to still have a successful redirect/migration strategy if we are redirect from our old domain, which is now being used by someone else.  I see a big mess, but I'm being told we can redirect all the links to our old content (which is now used by someone else) to our new url.  Thoughts? craziness? insanity? Or I'm just not getting it:)

[TomVolpe]

Hi there,

You’d redirect just the same as redirecting an entire site, except only create rules for the pages you used to own. Mirror your old content on your new site (if you can use the same URIs that would make things easier) and then write a series of rules to redirect only your content.

If your URIs are staying the same you could do something like:

RedirectCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/your-old-content/$ [NC,OR]
RedirectCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/folder/your other content$ [NC,OR]
RedirectCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/mynews/.* [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You could use regex to match lots of your URLs at once, but you’d need to be careful not to redirect the new owners pages too. When I redirect an entire site I always create a final rule which says anything else? Send it to the homepage like this:

RedirectRule .* http://www.newsite.com/ [R=301,L]

But this time you would leave that off, as any requests not caught by your rewrite condition will belong to the new owner and go to where they’re intended on the old site.

Hope that helps explain things,

Tom

[CC_Dallas]

Thank you very much! This was very helpful.  So this will work if our parent company is taking over our existing url and putting new content on it and moving us to a subdomain?

[TomVolpe]

Hi,

Yes this will work if you’re on a new domain, a subdomain, or even just in a folder on the existing domain.

As long as the URLs you were using aren’t being used for the parent companies' content you can redirect them all back to your subdomain with the method above.

Hope that helps,

Tom

[CC_Dallas]

Thank You!