Hi I have a question - stupid mistake I made. Back in April, I moved a site of mine from a directory in a subdomain to its own domain. Redirection from the old site was only doable on index page as I changed the whole concept of the new site and created directories instead of having all pages on the domain. I also removed the content of each page of the old site and instead put a link to the new one - my intend was leaving the info for a month or two just for people getting accustomed to the new site. The problem is that forgot to delete the entire old site and since it's a seasonal one and the season just started, the old site is still showing in SE result pages (in good position with no content ) as well as the new one. A good amount of visitors come from the old to the new one too. My question is since that old site has no content and the new one gets also good positions in SE result pages, would you recommend that I delete the entire old site now (leaving just the index page with redirects to the new one) or leave the old site as it is till the end of the season? Also, by deleting the entire old site, will the new one lose a bunch of backlinks or those links aren't taken into consideration by SE (I personally hope they aren't taken into account, of course since I build links back to the new site consistantly since April and a great part of pages have PR)? Apart from that, even if the old site is deleted now, it'll remain in SE results and this won't have incidence on a potential increase of visitors to the new site, am I wrong? Thanks for the answers Have a great weekend, Dom.
How do I do this? With an .htaccess file including all links from old site + all links to new one? Not sure how to rewrite... I never had to do it since I kept the same scheme for my other sites I moved to their own domain. Thanks for the help Dom
On the old site, put this code in your .htaccess file for each page you are redirecting. Understand though that this is a placeholder and you will have to replace the "canned" links with the actual links and files: Redirect 301 /webpage.html http://www.domain.com/newwebpage.html Code (markup):
yes that redirection works,but it is a pain if you have 1000's of page All the best, in case you use cpanel you can also use the cpanels redirection, there also of course you will have to do it for each old page to the new page
If you have a sitemap of the old site you can use sed (a command line tool) to place "Redirect 301 " at the beginning of every line (sed 's/^/Redirect 301 /g') and, if you're only redirecting to your home page, you could use sed to add " http://your-domain.com" to the end of every line (sed 's/$/ your-domain.com/g'). To remove the "http://" component of your sitemap's URLs, use sed 's##http://#g' . The spaces in those commands are required. Putting that into order: sed 's/^/Redirect 301 /g' sitemap.xml > resultfile.xml sed 's##http://#g' sitemap.xml > resultfile.xml sed 's/$/ your-domain.com/g' sitemap.xml > resultfile.xml I think sed is available for Windows, if not use a Linux live disk to the purpose of issuing the sed commands. N.B. if you have any slashes (/ or \) in either the replacement or to-be-replaced text then use this # in place of this / in the sed command e.g sed 's#$# http://your-domain.com#g' instead of 's/$/ http://your-domain.com/g'
Dion, thanks for the details but all this looks being Chinese to me Anyway, I managed to place all 130+ (or more, don't remember the number) links into the .htaccess file, and redirected each one to the new site and its new category. Took me about 1 hour and am happy like this. Just hope I won't get penalized or anything wrong will happen to the site Thanks a lot for the help Dom.
Fortunately, this didn't affect mine. Instead, the site on its own domain finally even got PR... which the old one didn't. And now that redirect has been done properly, I directly get visitors from the old site: all visitors as many didn't click on the link to the new one when arrived on the page before.