Old Version Of Site Interfering With New, What is the user-friendly way to go? Options

[johking]

Hi there

I have redesigned a site which previously had 2 separate addresses, one a University one, and that one is sitting in the SEs above the brand new design.

The previous webmaster has been advised by the Uni to leave a page there with a redrecting address, so that people will change their bookmarks - he thinks it is more user-friendly, so this is what he has done.

My advice was to put a permanent redirect on the page, rather than leaving it with the redirect address, as I thought it would be less confusing for users if we get rid of the page completely.

What would you do in this situation?

Thanks

Jo

[Jill]

The webmaster is very much incorrect. Get rid of the old page and simply redirect at the server level. Why the change of domains though? If you can use the old one, you might be better offf.

[johking]

Hi Jill

Thanks for the quick response. The Uni address is a legacy of a long way back. They were allowed to use that address (its a long address uni.ac.uk/~festival, etc) initially, then got their own address but kept on the uni pages - two of them as well! - so the site ended up with 3 version in the SEs. It's a bit of a guddle, to say the least. The Uni addresses are only one ahead in the SEs so best to get shot of them I think. Thanks for confirming that.

I have read that you can 301 redirect at subdirectory level, though never done it, so hope that's right.

Jo

[Randy]

I have read that you can 301 redirect at subdirectory level, though never done it, so hope that's right

You sure can. The .htaccess at a lower folder level will affect everything in or below that folder. So the only thing to make sure of it nobody elses stuff is below the directory level you'll be working on.

If there is something strange like that you can have an effect on those even lower directory levels too, with another .htaccess.

[johking]

Great Randy, that's how I understood it worked. Just heard back from the festival director that he is overriding the previous webmaster and insisting that I have access to make the changes, so that's excellent news.

Always a relief to be able to confirm that you are giving good advice, though, so thanks to you both.

Jo

[johking]

Randy - more help needed, I'm afraid.

When I put the htaccess on that subfolder it redirects you to the wrong place. What happens is that the address is uni.ac.uk/~festival and the redirect is going to newsite.org/~festival not to the root, so is ending up as a 404 not found, not surprisingly.

In the htaccess I put Redirect 301 / http://www.festival.com/

What am I doing wrong? I only have access to this subfolder to change things.

The other thing that is confusing me is that 2 addresses (/~festival and /folder/festival) are both showing in the serps, but they are one and the same folder.

Thanks so much

Jo

[Randy]

You probably won't want to use the mod_alias method of redirection Jo. This is what the Redirect 301 uses. Instead you'd be better off using the mod_rewrite method. It'll give you a lot more control over the situation.

If you want to just forward every request to the home page of the other domain, I'd recommend something like:

CODE

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /~festival
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.somedomain.com/? [R=301,L]

The question mark at the end of the domain in the RewriteRule is a special character in REGEX and will truncate any path, page or variable information that may have been in the original request.

On the other hand, if you want to redirect on a page-by-page level but strip out the ~festival/ part, the following should do the trick. This is for redirecting an address like uni.ac.uk/~festival/somepage.html directly to www.somedomain.com/somepage.html. It'll also maintain any query strings if any are present, simply stripping out the ~festival/ part.

CODE

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /~festival
RewriteRule ^~festival/(.*)$ http://www.somedomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Each of the above would go in the /~festival/ subdirectory if I understand what you're up against.

On the /~festival and /folder/festival confusion, it's probably something you won't need to concern yourself with. Most likely that's just how the server handles thsoe ~ user directories, giving them an aliased location to get the tilde out of the url string. I'd be willing to bet they're both really using the /~festival subdirectory, so the rewrite rules above should get both of 'em.

[johking]

CODE

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /~festival
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.somedomain.com/? [R=301,L]

The question mark at the end of the domain in the RewriteRule is a special character in REGEX and will truncate any path, page or variable information that may have been in the original request.


On the /~festival and /folder/festival confusion, it's probably something you won't need to concern yourself with. Most likely that's just how the server handles thsoe ~ user directories, giving them an aliased location to get the tilde out of the url string. I'd be willing to bet they're both really using the /~festival subdirectory, so the rewrite rules above should get both of 'em.

Hi Randy

That (the first option you gave, as in the quote above) is what I want (thanks for giving both options) and it worked a treat for the ~festival address, but the folder/festival one is stubbornly resisting any redirection.

At least I've got one sorted anyway, so many thanks indeed for that.

Jo

PS I like the way you always explain why things work, it's such a help

[johking]

Sorted it out by doing the following:

Options +FollowSymlinks

CODE

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /~festival
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.festival.com/? [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /folder/festival
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.festival.com/? [R=301,L]

you can get that domain into Google; you just won't get credit for any pre-existing links.

Seems to work fine. Is there a neater way?

Jo

Aargh. How do you stop the code from showing the URLs??

This post has been edited by Jill: Jan 14 2008, 01:55 PM

[Randy]

That's probably the neatest way to accomplish the task Jo. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/thumbup1.gif)