Thread

I am planning to move a static site to Expression Engine. 

The existing site is fairly well ranked with Google and other search engines and I don’t want the owner to lose his existing page rank.  I know I need to use 301 redirects probably utilising a .htaccess file.

As the new site will use the same domain names as the old site, what is the best way to achieve this?

i.e If the old static page was:

http://www.mydomain.com/0-1page1.html

and the new page was:

http://www.mydomain.com/my-keyword/

Many thanks for your help.

Definately use 301 redirects, the basic syntax for each page you want to redirect is…

Redirect 301 /0-1page1.html http://www.mydomain.com/my-keyword/

Hi devilslayer,

Rob is on point here. You will certainly want to establish 301 redirects for all of your old content. That will tell the search engines that your content now permanently lives at the new URL and they will update the searches accordingly. Is there anything else we can assist you with?

Cheers!

One other small thing to add, if you’re using index.php removal be careful your 301s play nicely with the rest of the htaccess rules.

This has worked for me:

RewriteEngine On 

RewriteRule ^old-url <a href="http://www.domain.com/new-url">http://www.domain.com/new-url</a> [L,R=301]

RewriteCond $1 !\.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

cheers

Do I need to add all the URL’s into the .htaccess file?

Redirect 301 /0-1page1.html <a href="http://www.mydomain.com/my-keyword/">http://www.mydomain.com/my-keyword/</a>
Redirect 301 /0-2page2.html <a href="http://www.mydomain.com/my-keyword2/">http://www.mydomain.com/my-keyword2/</a>

Yep, each one on a new line as you have it (for readability if nothing else)