Hi g1tech,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

This search [google.com] should help you to get started.

Jim

Thank you, I've looked through those but I guess I just need to know if there is any code to redirect all traffic coming to the old domain, to the new domain's corresponding page. Like:

[olddomain.com...]
gets redirected to: [newdomain...]

If there is some code or script that can used to do this for all pages, without having to make an entry for each individual page in the .htaccess file, this would be what I'm after.

From everything I've read, there is no shortcut, but thought I'd check with you guys to be sure before I type out almost 1000 entries in our .htaccess file :)

If you'd read the Redirect [httpd.apache.org] documentation in Apache mod_alias (linked from several of those threads), you'd have found that you can do the whole domain with a single directive:

Redirect 301 / http://www.example.com/

That's it.

Jim

I ended up using this code in my .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) [newdomain.com...] [R=301,L]

And it works just the way it should :)

I assume that this is equivalent to the above suggestion...

I thought I'd update this thread with the results of my 301 redirect for further discussion. The redirects work flawlessly so any visitors clicking back on bookmarked links and/or finding our old URL's in the search engines are finding the correct pages.

However, in the 2 weeks that we've had the 301 redirect in place, our olddomain.com URLs have fallen to 2nd and 3rd pages (sometimes lower) in Google on searches that we previously appeared at or near the top. These old URLs haven't yet been replaced with the newdomain.com URLs that we are redirecting the olddomain.com traffic to. Our 'free traffic' is down sharply during this time.

Is this normal? Has anyone else that has changed website domains experienced something similar?

Thanks,
g1tech

It may take up to 30 days for G to figure out the new 'plan' of your site and re-assign all the page-ranking factors from and to the new URLs. Best advice is to leave the site alone and work on something else, and let them get this done before making any further changes.

Jim

Hello, to update the thread, it has been exactly 30 days since we implemented the 301 redirect - Google and Yahoo still have our old URL in their indexes. MSN has updated properly.

Can someone verify the code that we used is correct?

------------------
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) [newdomain.com...] [R=301,L]
------------------

It forwards incoming traffic from www.olddomain.com/anypage.htm to www.newdomain.com/anypage.htm perfectly, but Google and Yahoo haven't updated their index with www.newdomain.com yet. Meanwhile our SERP's on G and Y continue to drop.

Maybe the answer is simply more patience..

If both olddomain and newdomain point to the same server filespace, then you will need to tell this rewrite rule not to redirect newdomain to itself, which it will do unless told otherwise.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.newdomain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The added RewriteCond prevent the rule from being applied unless the requested domain is NOT "www.newdomain.com"

As with any change to your server configuration, I strongly suggest that you use something like the "Live HTTP Headers" extension to Firefox to carefully check the server response headers sent by your server. You should see one and only one 301-Moved Permanently response when requesting any page on "olddomain.com".

Jim

Thanks for the reply, Jim. The two sites (olddomain.com, newdomain.com) are hosted at two different webhosts altogether.

Would we still have to make this adjustment?

I'll look into the Live HTTP headers now...

Here is the result of the HTTP Headers:

-----------------------
[olddomain.com...]

GET /anypage.htm HTTP/1.1
Host: www.olddomain.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.10) Gecko/20070216 Firefox/1.5.0.10
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: __utma=103541569.1270042340.1156519102.1165820082.1167790803.17; www%2Epro%2FCustomerID=1

HTTP/1.x 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2007 20:50:30 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix)
Location: [newdomain.com...]
Keep-Alive: timeout=2, max=199
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Looks fine. So it's all down to waiting for the old URLs to be spidered, the new URLs to be substituted, and then (in a second phase) for the PageRank to be assigned forward from old to new...

Jim

Jim, thanks again for your help with this. Confidence is restored. I'll post updates periodically when appropriate...