Redirection Problem

[carl_daedricdigital]

Wondering if anyone could offer some tips here please. I cannot share the site name so will try and be as detailed as possible.

My client had their site on a .com domain and have decided to move to a co.uk domain. The new site has been put on the uk domain with more or less the same structure, save for pages which have been removed or merged.

I am now setting up 301 redirects to tell the engines about the moved site, however this is giving me no end of grief. I can get domain.com to redirect to domain.co.uk no problems, however, if I try and redirect any of the inner pages to their new locations they all end up on the .co.uk home not where they should be. Given the homepage isn't designed to rank for all the terms.

The htaccess I am using is below, I cannot see anything wrong with it, can anyone else?

Redirect 301 / http://newdomain.co.uk/
Redirect 301 /villa_rental.php http://newdomain.co.uk/villa_rental.html
Redirect 301 /new_home.php http://newdomain.co.uk/new_home.html
Redirect 301 /http://newdomain.com/villas.php http://newdomain.co.uk/villastyles.html
Redirect 301 /developments.php http://newdomain.co.uk/developments.html
Redirect 301 /solana_hills.php http://newdomain.co.uk/solana_hills.html
Redirect 301 /middle_east.php http://newdomain.co.uk/middle_east.html
Redirect 301 /denia.php http://newdomain.co.uk/denia.html
Redirect 301 /faq.php http://newdomain.co.uk/faq.html

I have tried both relative and full paths for the old site but doesn't make any difference. Does it matter the old site is php and the new html?

many thanks

[GregB123]

May be totally wrong here, but it is a quick test...

Switch the order of your redirects. First list all the old specific page to new specific page rules. Then last in the list put this rule - Redirect 301 / http://newdomain.co.uk/ (which you currently have first). That may let most of the specific pages do their thing before that general rule sends whatever is left to the homepage.

The way you code your htaccess is a bit different from what I do. Mine has a lot more code for each rule, and some qualifiers like L and NE...

Let us know if it works?

[JaneCopland]

Hi Carl,

You should be able to do this with one rule:

Options +FollowSymLinks 
RewriteEngine on 
RewriteRule (.*) [newdomain.co.uk] [R=301,L]

Give this a shot and see if it works. It should direct http://www.olddomain.com/villa_rental.php to www.newdomain.com/villa_rental.php and so forth.

Cheers,

Jane