301 redirection help needed!

[RickyShockley]

Hi all,

So if we used to have a domain (let's say olddomain.com) and we had a new site created at newdomain.com how do we properly setup redirects page to page. Caveat, the urls have changed so for instance the old page oldomain.com/service is now newdomain.com/our-services on the new site.

• Do we need to have hosting on the old site?
• Do we need to setup individual 301s for each page corresponding to the new page?

Just looking for the easiest way to do this CORRECTLY.

Thanks,

Ricky

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Ricky

That is pretty much exactly what you need to do.

301 olddomain to newdomain

Then at page level

301 olddomain/services to newdomain/new-services

You will need hosting on the old site but only really so that the .htaccess file can be filled with redirects. If you let the domain expire then Google et al won't see the redirects. If there are inbound links from other websites then you need to do this to maintain link equity to the new domain and pages.

Regards

Nigel

[bill369]

You have to do page by page like Nigel suggested that is the best way to do it and keep them in place for ever!.

[ThompsonPaul]

There's no reason to keep the old hosting just for the redirects. And that introduces a real weak point as at some future date, someone who doesn't realise it's still running only an htaccess file will delete what they think is unnecessary hosting.

Instead, use DNS of the old domain to point it to the new domain and then write the redirects in the new domain's htaccess.

Paul

P.S. And yes, you'll need to write redirects for each old URL that changes. If there are patterns of URLs, it's worth using regex to cut down the number of redirects written.

[RickyShockley]

Hi Paul, thanks! This is what I was looking for. So as long as we forward the old domain, it looks like we can set up the individual URL redirects simply using a plugin in Wordpress. Got it to work!

[Nigel_Carr]

Good one Paul - is there an article on this you can point me at?

Thanks