301 Multiple Redirect

I have an existing site A I want to redirect to existing site B, in order to consolidate my content, since they are both on the same theme.

I know how to do a straight 301 redirect. What is making me a little gunshy is the fact that exisitng site A has a 301 redirect in place at the moment which I added in order to transition from .html pages to .php pages, like so:

What would be the best way to handle this in order to keep the html to php, but also to redirect to Site B?

1) .html site A -> .php site A -> .php site B
2) .html site A -> .php site B
3) .html site A -> .html Site B +
.html site A-> .php Site B
4) something else?

Any ideas?

 

The best way is add a file handler so your .htaccess file, that way does not really care if site A or site B is either php or html because both extensions will be parsed as PHP

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .html .htm .php

Code (markup):

 

Thanks Pat.

Should that be added to the old site's .htaccess or the new site, Site B?

 

Don't use that. It tells your server to treat those extensions as PHP files. Now every time a .HTML file is requested, instead of simply being sent straight back to the user, it must first be parsed through the PHP engine - even if its just a plain html file. The performance hit this has will depend on both your server and the amount of traffic. You could probably get away with it but it's not a very good practice. You were along the right lines with mod_rewrite.

The best solution would not involve sending more than one redirect header, so in the htaccess for Site A:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html $1.php
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.siteB.com/$1.php [R=301,L]

Code (markup):

If its a .html, we first rewrite to .php internally (without redirecting). Then we redirect everything to the new domain.

In theory, there should not be any links to a .html site B page if its a new domain. The inlinks to .html site A pages have already been sorted to redirect straight to site B .php, so you shouldn't need any redirects on site B.

 

Thanks, rodney88, that makes sense. But shouldn't it be redirected to site B, like this:

you wrote:

 

Whoops, sorry my bad. Yes, it should be site B. Apologies for any confusion.