Help creating a 301 redirect in my htaccess file
-
Hi Guys,
I'm trying to build a 301 file with the file requirements:
- It should be visible only for Google and other Search Engine Agents.
- It will have a few direct redirects.
- A few URL must be dynamic redirect. For example each page the starts with olddomain.com/category and is not in the list of of direct redirects should be redirect for newdomain.com/category
Here is my start point:
#301 Starts here
Set the agents
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Googlebot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} msnbot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} SlurpMake the direct redirect.
Redirect 301 /category/sub1 http://www.newdomain.com/category/sub1
Redirect 301 /category/sub2 http://www.newdomain.com/category/sub2Redirect everything else
Redirect 301 /category/* http://www.newdomain.com/category
#End of my 301
Will that work how I want? is there anything wrong?
-
Hi Thompson,
Thanks for your input, so I'm planning on eventually do the 301 for everyone. I'm re-designing a big website and not everything is done, but I want users that are looking for the content that I already completed to land in the new site. (because the new site has a much higher conversion rate).
In other hand I have 30% of my traffic in my old site coming from direct visitors, I dont want those visitors to be send to other URL because it would be confusing. however I want people coming from google to go my new site...
Do you think I should sacrifice usability, so I don't risk Google to think I'm trying to do some kind of black hat, strategy.
-
Setting redirects to apply only to search crawlers is pretty much their definition of cloaking, Felip3. The site could end up in a world of hurt if/when caught.
What's the reason for wanting the crawlers to be redirected differently than users? Maybe there's a better way to accomplish what you need in a way that doesn't break their terms of service.
Paul
-
For the directories I think you need to go down the rewrite route. This isn't probably functioning correctly but you get the principle.
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /category/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/category/sub1/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/category/sub2/
RewriteRule ^category/(.*) http://www.newdomain.com/category/$1 [L,R=301]RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /category/sub1
RewriteRule ^category/sub1(.*) http://www.newdomain.com/category/sub1/$1 [L,R=301]RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /category/sub2
RewriteRule ^category/sub2(.*) http://www.newdomain.com/category/sub2/$1 [L,R=301]
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Htaccess code to 301 redirect a folder change
Hi, I need some help to redirect all my site as there was a folder change. eg, the old structure was www.mysite.com/stuff-1/bags.html and I need it to go to the same structure without the "-1" eg: /stuff/bags.html
Technical SEO | | Paul_MC
The "bags.html" will be lots of different products, so this would be a wildcard? What would the htaccess code need to be? Thanks0 -
To 301 redirect or not to 301 redirect? duplicate content problem www.domain.com and www.domain.com/en/
Hello, If your website is getting flagged for duplicate content from your main domain www.domain.com and your multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ is it wise to 301 redirect the english multilingual website to the main site? Please advise. We've recently installed the joomish component to one of our joomla websites in an effort to streamline a spanish translation of the website. The translation was a success and the new spanish webpages were indexed but unfortunately one of the web developers enabled the english part of the component and some english webpages were also indexed under the multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ and that flagged us for duplicate content. I added a 301 redirect to redirect all visitors from the www.domain/en/ webpages to the main www.domain.com/ webpages. But is that the proper way of handling this problem? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | Chris-CA0 -
Htaccess redirect with question mark
Hi I have a problem setting up my htaccess for a specific page that has a question mark in the link, and one that has a space in the link and also a question mark. So I would like 2 redirects in my htaccess like that: www.olddomain.com/page.php?page=pagename1 to www.newdomain.com/newpage1.html www.olddomain.com/page.php?page=page name2 to www.newdomain.com/newpage2.html I have tried with something like this but doesn't work: RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^page.php?page=pagename1 "http://www.newdomain.com/newpage1.html" [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^page.php?page=page name2 "http://www.newdomain.com/newpage2.html" [R=301,L] Could someone tell me what exactly I have to change? Thanks
Technical SEO | | darkanweb0 -
How to create a delayed 301 redirect that still passes juice?
My company is merging one of our sites into another site. At first I was just going to create a 301 redirect from domainA.com to domainB.com but we decided that would be too confusing for customers expecting to see domainA.com so we want to create a page that says something like "We've moved. please visit domainB.com or be redirected after 10 seconds". My question is, how do I create a redirect that has a delay and will this still pass the same amount of juice that a regular 301 redirect would? I've heard that meta refreshes are considered spammy by Google.
Technical SEO | | bewoldt0 -
Will rankings for my micro site rank better if I 301 redirect it to my main site?
This is my first time asking so I will try to be as clear as possible. Ok, I have a micro site that is an (exact match domain) and the domain is a couple 3-4 years old and ranks very well for several search terms. The main two terms it ranks for are like this. houses for rent in XXXXX XXXXX homes for rent (XXXXX equals a city name) The issue is this site has no backlinks, zero advanced SEO, I only did basic optimization to it when i set the site up. Even site structure, url structure all are not good.
Technical SEO | | Robbie8299
The only page I have ever even seen rank is the main root url. But with all that the site does really good in the top 1-2 results for key search terms. Now, I have a main site that is a very big site that has steadily been climbing in search terms every month with great backlinks, optimized for the city and all.
It currently ranks on second page for the listed search terms listed above. What I want to do is 301 redirect this microsite to my city page on my main site that is much better optimized for the key city terms.
The 301 redirect would point this "root domain" (mymicrosite.com) to my city page that looks like this. www.mymaindomain.com/city/XXXXXXX If I do this will Google rank my main URL city page as well as it ranks this microsite with zero links, seo, etc, etc. What happens if it does not? Will I be able to turn off the 301 redirect and keep the microsite rankings? My main reason for wanting this is I want this city page to rank well and I only want to optimize one site instead of both. Any help would be great!0 -
Any way around buying hosting for an old domain to 301 redirect to a new domain?
Howdy. I have just read this QA thread, so I think I have my answer. But I'm going to ask anyway! Basically DomainA.com is being retired, and DomainB.com is going to be launched. We're going to have to redirect numerous URLs from DomainA.com to DomainB.com. I think the way to go about this is to continue paying for hosting for DomainA.com, serving a .htaccess from that hosting account, and then hosting DomainB.com separately. Anybody know of a way to avoid paying for hosting a .htaccess file on DomainA.com? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | SamTurri0 -
Redirect or not to redirect
We are rebuilding a website and try to get rid of errors. The content remains exactly the same but we correct the code and make it load faster. The site has quite many backlinks and I can't decide whether to remove .html endings from the urls and 301 redirect to the new ones or leave them with the older ending. If I remove the endings how much of the link juice will be passed? Anyone any idea?
Technical SEO | | sesertin0 -
301 Redirect for homepage with language code
In my multilingual Magento store, I want to redirect the hompage URL with an added language code to the base URL. For example, I want to redirect http://www.mysite.com/tw/ to http://www.mysite.com/ which has the exact same content. Using a canonical URL will help with search engines, but I would just rather nip the problem in the butt by not showing http://www.mysite.com/tw/ to visitors in the first place. Problem is that I don't want (can't have) all /tw/ removed from URLs due to Magento limitations, so I just want to know how to redirect this single URL. Since rewrites are on, adding Redirect 301 /tw http://www.88kbbq.com would redirect all URLs with the /tw/ language code to ones without. Not an option. Hope folks can lend a hand here.
Technical SEO | | kwoolf0