Hi,

I need some kind of cleaver redirect code here!

Domain A have about forty specific URLs that I would like to forward to the new Doman B. How should I do this in a search engine re-index new URL only friendly way?

Domain A should be used for other purposes, so it must not be excluded from search engines all together. And it should not be delayed from the forwarding/URL rewriting to Domain B either.

Any hot tips and example code here?

Apache server, PHP

Why clever code ?

just add

header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.newdomain.com/newdir/newpage.htm");
exit();

to the top of each page to redirect

Uhm, do you got another suggestion that don't leave so many "empty" documents on the server?

not sure why "empty" documents would be a problem but,

write 40 lines in your .htaccess file to catch those specific pages being requested
write 40 lines in a custom 404 page to catch those specific pages erroring out

If the page URLs have some common feature (other than the hostname) use wildcards on either of the above solutions.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

(..) write 40 lines in a custom 404 page to catch those specific pages erroring out (..)

OK, I did not quite cough that one. How could I do this? :/

Have the old URIs and new URIs in arrays.
Grab the requested URI from the page. (it's usually sent in $_SERVER("QUERY_STRING") with "404;" prepended to the original URL).
Find this in the array and then redirect to the new URL indicated by the array index.


The code in the earlier post will do the SE "friendly" redirect.

You can just do a mod_rewrite in Apache? It's cleaner and the rules are flexible.

The .htaccess option is probably best. Six months (hopefully 3) maximum is the timeframe we're looking at for a search engine finding the new pages. Any search engine not finding them in that time-frame is not important.

Depending on the structure of the site, mod_rewrite could be a better option. Else, forty lines of custom .htaccess code, to me, is far the preference above writing 40 redirect files.

Whichever route you choose, a permanent redirect is needed. Not only for search engines, but also for users who may have bookmarked.