Redirects Going to the Wrong Place

[vitasouthmktg]

I just checked our rankings for a few of our top keywords from a previously merged domain, and we are not anywhere on the first page (we used to rank #1).

I then manually typed in the url of a top product we sell from our old site that was merged into the new site. It turns out that the redirect isn't going to the right place at all (which probably explains why the page isn't ranking).

Here is part of the code from our htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^neuroformulas.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.neuroformulas.com$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "http://www.vitasouth.com/brands/NeuroScience.html" [R=301,L]

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

redirect 301 /products/Kavinace.html http://www.vitasouth.com/products/NeuroScience-Kavinace.html

The bottom redirect (http://www.neuroformulas.com/products/Kavinace.html) should be going to the url specified. Instead, it goes to http://www.vitasouth.com/NeuroScience.html/Kavinace.html (NOT A VALID URL!).

Please help!

Thanks!

-Matt

[benjaminspak]

I take it you're using Apache? Have you already looking at these tutorials?

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/howto/htaccess.html

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html

In addition even if the link is 301d properly, if you are redirecting to a completely new domain that baby domain has to be evaluated by Google all over again. So you'll go through the sandbox period, it's going to take a bit to get Google to trust your new domain as it did the old one.