"Page cannot be found" redirection

How do I redirect people to my home page if they go onto a page which no longer exists? This could be useful for me as I am moving around 90% of my website soon. I understand its something done in the .htaccess file but I'm not really sure what exactly to do?

 

you may use 301 redirects, that'll help you out with Search Engines also

here are some samples
http://www.webmasters.am/forum/showthread.php?t=14

that site is under construction so don't pay attention to the design and that the forum is empty

 

oh, forgot, you might wanna use this URL and see this examples too

http://www.deluxe.am/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=45

 

ErrorDocument 404 /index.html (or whatever)

 

HTTP 404 is bad if you do SEO, so the best way it HTTP 301 redirect

 

Presumably thats added to the htaccess?

Its only a temporary thing, just til G gets my new pages indexed.

 

You can add this to your .htaccess and users will be redirected to the homepage (or whatever you say).

But if you wanna do it for seo, you must redirect every URL to the new one. Get a list of the "old" URL's, then get a list of the new ones. Now, in your htaccess:

redirect 301 /folder/oldfilename.html http://www.domain.com/folder/newfilename.html

and do that for every URL.

If you have a large site, better you try to find a regular expression instead of having a supah-dupah large htaccess. Also, I believe this can be done by the htconfig of Apache, and is much better for the load of the server.

But if you're lazy and don't care about SEO... yeah, 404 is OK. But I don't recommend it!

 

If you use cPanel, you can easily modify your default 404 page to whatever you want, make it a smart marketing message before you redirect

 

My host is dreamhost , you know if it can be done through there?

 

what is the hosting control panel?

 

Hello, maney.
To redirect people looking for a page that no longer exists, you must first make clear if you want to do this page by page individually, or you want to do it for any page that may be missing. In the first case, you may consider replacing the outdated page with a page that contains nothing but the redirection using a META tag. The best solution, however, is to use the htaccess file where you insert a line for each page redirected. Using this method does not require that the old page be present physically.
On the other hand, if you want only to provide a means by which the user does not receive the dreaded 404 message, you may set up a custom 404 page that may just tell the user to go to the home page, or you may include a full list of replacements for the pages that are missing.
Good luck.