are you doing it through htaccess? you should be. if you are then yes you can remove everything besides htaccess. your code should look like:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
and it is a “blanket” redirect but as far as any search engine is concerned it’s any page’s individual url. it would be ridiculously counter intuitive to hard code each existing url.
simplistik, I was taking my info from this google webmasters post:
Don’t do a blanket redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it’s not a good user experience. A page-to-page redirect (where each page on the old site gets redirected to the corresponding page on the new site) is more work, but gives your users a consistent and transparent experience.
Do you think I’ve interpreted it wrongly?
Thanks for the help.
Got ya, I see. Well personally, I know that 301 are completely valid redirects. What I think this is saying though, is to try not to completely redirect traffic to say the homepage, a many-to-one relationship. So if someone goes to
oldsite.com/page1
oldsite.com/page2
oldsite.com/page3
etc
it doesn’t just go to
newsite.com/
it should have a 1 to 1 relationship, so what they want is for
oldsite.com/page1
oldsite.com/page2
oldsite.com/page3
to goto
newsite.com/page1
newsite.com/page2
newsite.com/page3
I believe that’s all they’re warning you from, however with WordPress if you try to go to newsite.com/page2 and it doesn’t exist, it’ll give a 301 permanent redirect to a 404 page, which to me, is completely valid if the article/page doesn’t exist anymore. Ultimately though, manually typing each and every url/uri in for a redirect on your site would be a pain in the arse to maintain. And this is just my opinion of course. However, I’ve never seen anyone do manual redirects to all their pages.
Yeah I seen your point. I’m actually having some problems with 301’s taking effect with a couple of test redirects I tried out, so I’ll have to see if I can sort that out before I proceed anyway.
Thanks for the input and I’ll keep this thread updated.
