301 in htaccess

[inertia]

Hello again! A company of ours has 2 parallel sites. We have decided to shut down the poor one and focus on the better one.

To do this i have transferred all the decent content to the primary site and setup 301s on the second site, using htaccess, to the relevant pages. Is this ok?! Any other tips?

One problem i do have is that there are a lot of product pages from the secondary site appearing in the index for long tail keywords. Rather than 301 redirect all of these individually is there a quicker way? All of these pages are in one directory, e.g. www.site.com/shop. Can i add a single redirect, using htaccess, to this directory or will this cause all of the pages which are in the serps to be de-listed?

Cheers guys. Please feel free to query any of the above as my descriptive skills are a little poor this monday morning!

[Feydakin]

Yes, you are doing it the right way..

You can redirect all of the pages in the sub-directory to your home page or to the store page on the new site which is probably the best place to point it..

Once the 301 is seen by the search engines they will read it to mean that the page has been permanently moved to the new location so yes, the old pages will be de-indexed over time..

[inertia]

Originally Posted by Feydakin

You can redirect all of the pages in the sub-directory to your home page or to the store page on the new site which is probably the best place to point it..

To do this, is it this line of code in the htaccess file?

redirect 301 http://www.site1.com/store http://www.site2.com/store

Will this work for any page which appears in this sub directory and lower directories ?

[thindenim]

You need to put in a wild card: -

RewriteRule ^store/(.*) http://www.site2.com/store/$1 [R=301,L]

Think this should do the trick.

[inertia]

Cheers dude! Mod rewrite is next on my list of things to learn...

[inertia]

That Mod rewrite code hasnt worked mate. Any ideas? Surely i can do this with a standard 301!?

[Jean-Luc]

Your code is not valid.

redirect 301 store http://www.site2.com/store

This code redirects URL's like http://www.site1.com/store/this_url to http://www.site2.com/store/this_url.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^store(.*)$ http://www.site2.com/store/ [L,R=301]

This code redirects URL's like http://www.site1.com/store/this_url to http://www.site2.com/store/.

Place this .htaccess file in the home directory of site1.com.

Jean-Luc

[thindenim]

Lose the trailing slash actually and it will definitely work for /store or anything after that: -

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^store(.*) http://www.site2.com/store$1 [R=301,L]