HTACCESS SEO tips for redirecting an old site to a new site

Apache servers, which is the technology used by most web servers, offer a great way to manage information via .HTACCESS  (Hypertext Access) files. This is the default configuration file and will over ride your web sites settings. A word of caution…. a single typo will shut down your site. If this does happen simply remove your most recent changes to the .HTACCESS file and reload the new code very carefully.

When moving websites we want to make sure that we pass all of the SEO juice from the old site to the new site, the following are a set of 301 redirects that will facilitate that process. Sometimes your may just want to redirect the entire site but on other cases you may want to be a little more specific and user friendly

1) 301 redirect the site root but leave all other folders in their current location

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} olddomain.com [NC] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$
Rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/ [L,R=301]

2) Selectively redirect the contents of one folder on the old site  to the new site

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^oldfolder/(.*) http://www.newdomain.com/ [R=301,L] 3) 301 redirect and entire web site

redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com

4) 301 redirect a single page

redirect 301 /folder/oldpage.html  http://www.newdomain.com/folder/newpage.html

Happy redirecting.