Permanent URL Redirect

  • Resolved Ron Strilaeff

    (@ronstrilaeff)


    12 years, 1 month ago

    This is not a wordpress specific question but surely someone here has done the same thing as I am needing to do very soon.

    I have oldone.com which has many links to it from the rest of the web

    I created a multisite called main.net with a subdomain prepared as newone.main.net to which all the posts, pages and images from oldone.com will be imported.

    I know how to do all of the above.

    What I don’t know is where exactly do I make the reference to tell the world that everything from oldone.com can now be found forever at newone.main.net ?

    Of course I want all the permalinks to keep working so that this:
    https://oldone.com/2012/10/post-title/

    would now exist at
    https://newone.main.net/2012/10/post-title/

    I’m hoping that I do not have to maintain a site at oldone.com forever with some redirect code but that some magic DNS reference can make it happen with zero maintenance. The intention is that anyone who clicked on a link to oldone.com would be automatically transported to the corresponding page on the new site with no delays or messages.

    Also, I’m willing to “own” the domain name oldone.com forever if necessary.

    I think this is a routine thing but have never had to do it before now. Thanks for your expert advice!

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)
  • wpismypuppet

    (@wordpressismypuppet)

    If you are running on an Apache server with rights to create an .htaccess, all your problems will simply vanish! Follow these rules:

    https://jesperastrom.com/seo/how-to-do-a-htaccess-301-redirect/

    We’ve had to do this many times in our career. This is the best approach to keeping SEO in tack.

    Simply to redirect from 1 site to another link are simple:

    1. Create 1 file named index.html

    2. Add this script to the clean file:

    <html>
	<head>
		<title>Redirecting...</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://www.yournewsite.com/" />

</html>

    Where https://www.yournewsite.com/ you can change to the new site.

    I hope you enjoy with this info!

    Thread Starter Ron Strilaeff

    (@ronstrilaeff)

    Hi, thanks. Yes I do in fact. I have several domains pointing at different folders on my host. So which .htaccess file to I put the redirect code in?

    oldone.com lives at /oc and has its own .htaccess file.

    main.net lives at /mn with the subdomain flavor of the wp-multisite .htaccess file.

    And wpismypuppet you are right the whole point of this is to maintain the SEO and never abandon the thousands of archived links floating around out there. Some one clicking on and old link will get exactly the same content but the address bare will show the new URL. New links will be made to the new url, but the old ones could be there forever.

    -Ron

    Nops you must put this file in the new domain hosting NOT in .htaccess.

    So when a guy click on new domain , this file index.html from your new domain will redirect this users to the oldone.com automaticly. You DO NOT must to edit .htaccess

    Like i said create on your new hoster an index.html

    if you dont have one, (if you have it cleanned this) and add the script what i give you, something like this :

    <html>
	<head>
		<title>Redirecting...</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://www.oldone.com/" />

</html>

    Thats it! No need other thing! I hope you understand it!

    Simple!

    If you have multi-domains create same copy of index.html in every folder were you want to redirect. All domain you want will be redirected to this old-domain.

    Thread Starter Ron Strilaeff

    (@ronstrilaeff)

    Thanks for the details doomnezeu. However, I’m thinking the 301 redirect is what I want. I responded “yes I do..” to wpismypuppet’s comment about Apache and ability to modify my .htaccess.

    I want the oldone.com to never be seen but have all visitors immediatley be redirected in the background to newone.main.net without that extra bounce to the old site. Imagine that canada.com got absorbed by usa.net, we would not want a million visitors hitting canada.com/content/index.html before being sent to state51.usa.net/content.

    wpismypuppet

    (@wordpressismypuppet)

    You want to put the redirects here:

    oldone.com lives at /oc and has its own .htaccess file.

    You will have to leave the old domain up for a bit, until Google has indexed all the new stuff. Of course, delete all the files and just leave the .htaccess file. After a month or two, kill the old domain completely.

    If your file structure is exactly the same from domain to domain (ie. olddomain.com/myfile/ -> newdomain.com/myfile/) then you can do a simple:

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

    If ANY of the file structure has changed… then you’ll need one redirect for each page that has a new file structure. For example, if you had olddomain.com/myfile/, and the new structure is newdomain.com/myfolder/myfile/, then you’ll need:

    redirect 301 /myfile/ https://www.newdomain.com/myfolder/myfile/

    Again, one of those for each page that has a new home. The very last line in your .htaccess file would be the:

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

    From above… keep in mind that you need a blank line at the VERY end of the .htaccess file. Read this document too… talks more about SEO reasons and has more details. Plus a little humor ??

    https://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2007/03/how-to-properly-implement-a-301-redirect/

    wpismypuppet

    (@wordpressismypuppet)

    @doomnezeu

    While your method WILL work just fine, it will absolutely kill any and all SEO you might have already for your website. Your method is only a good option if you don’t care about SEO.

    wpismypuppet

    (@wordpressismypuppet)

    I should mention that if possible, you should leave the 301s in place indefinitely, as anyone linked to your site from somewhere else will get a 404 once you delete the 301s. And in that case, your SEO will take a hit losing all those linked people (has nothing to do with Google, and only you know if people are linking your website through SEO tools).

    However, it may not pay to keep a whole domain for this reason. Weight carefully the money vs. the ranking and make a choice.

    If you want to cloak oldomain , by new domain you can cloak in your DNS server , for example like me i use for this zoneedit.com , or :
    try on your hoster to create an alias like other my domain:
    examplu:

    My domain https://www.legendofmir.ro are hosted in the main /httpdocs/ of my hosting site.

    For others domain https://www.αγγελιε?εργασια?.com (now underconstruction) i made an folder named aggelies in the /httpdocs/ of https://www.legendofmir.ro

    I make it an alias in the option of my hosting , and i redirect from there option, to the https://www.legendofmir.ro/aggelies (eg.) and when i adreess on IE https://www.αγγελιε?εργασια?.com, only this name appear, not https://www.legendofmir.ro/aggelies.

    I hope you understand me, this 2 way with alias , or using an DNS server like zoneedit.com. (are free and the best in the world !!!)

    Thats it , enjoy with new infos! ??

    DOOMNEZEU

    My mistake my are site https://www.αγγελιε?εργασια?.gr not .com.

    Anyway dsnt matter.

    Thread Starter Ron Strilaeff

    (@ronstrilaeff)

    Thanks guys.

    Here is my write up of how I plan to proceed.

    And so you don’t have to follow that link, here is the redirect code I’m going to use (the 302 will become a 301):

    RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([^.:]+\.)*testsyte1\.com\.?(:[0-9]*)?$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://one.testyng.com/$1 [R=302,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([^.:]+\.)*testsyte2\.com\.?(:[0-9]*)?$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://two.testyng.com/$1 [R=302,L]

    It works very well on my test sites. The live sites will be a bit more complicated since most of the content is in 3rd party tables and needs to be converted to a new custom post type.

    But that’s for another day.

    wpismypuppet

    (@wordpressismypuppet)

    Glad I could help. Also I read through your post on “URL Redirection For WordPress Multisite Subdomains” and it’s good… but there are some steps that could be simplified. Especially if the person has access to the SQL database. If you’d like some help writing that up, let me know.

    On a daily basis, we create “test” sites on our website using sub-domains. When the site is ready to go live, we port the entire WordPress site over to their domain. Similar to what you are doing here. The steps we use are shorter and easier and don’t require recreating anything, even the widgets.

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