301 redirects on missing pages to homepage to raise PR

I'm in the middle of converting my site from and HTML site to a PHP site so all deep linking will be lost, I was just wondering if I could have the lost pages be 301 redirects to the frontpage to increase the PR of the homepage, Is that possible if so how? What would you recommend to save this PR...

 

I better choice would be to use enter a line in the .htaccess to tell the server to parse html as php.

 

yeah but the pages names aren't staying the site is being completely changed so it is not like pagetitle.htm to pagetitle.php type od switch the whole site is changing...

 

You will be a drop in traffic then. There is no real sure fire way to make the switch. The best bet is to try and keep the filenames the same.

301 mod_rewrite redirect is your best bet then...

 

so how do you actually make a 301 redirect is there some code I paste into the missing page

 

Here is an example of 2 mod_rewrite directives to add to your .htaccess, one is for a match of a string, the other is for a specific file.

RedirectMatch permanent /graphic-design-articles/.* http://www.xxxxxx.com
Redirect permanent /site-map-multimedia.html http://www.xxxxx.com/

Code (markup):

 

That is not a good idea as you could create duplicate content problems, as the SEs would think the error page is the index page. Create a custom 404 error page redirection in your .htaccess file.

 

Yes DC, that is exactly what I want to do I want all the missing pages to do a 301 redirect to the homepage, but I dont know how, could you help me out?

 

Sure bro, put this in your .htaccess file in your root directory:

Then just create the 404.htm (call it whatever) to that location on your server. On the custom 404.htm page, just make sure to include your main navigational structure, to make it easy for the visitor to locate stuff on your site.

 

Ok done it, takes me to the 404.htm page now, how do i add a 301 redirect from it to the front page?

 

You wouldn't want to. Setting up the custom 404 error page is just to capture any error page traffic.

 

So couldn't I just straight redirect them to the front page if they go to the wrong page, would search bots see it as a 301 redirect if in the htaccess i change the .com/404.htm straight to the domain...Because I heard 301 redirects save PR from old site to new site and prevent duplicate content...