Keeping all links intact with 301 redirect

[lukkyjay]

I currently have two sites. The first one has thousands of pages, most of which are .html. I'm looking at doing a 301 redirect to a new domain name but I want to keep all of my IBL's intact. (I have a lot of deep IBL's to specific pages) I plan on copying the content of the first site to the second site keeping the same sub-page name structure - except for the fact that I'm going to use .php.

For example, I want to make sure that all links to the page http://www.firstsite.com/specific-page.html get transferred directly to http://www.secondsite.com/specific-page.php

Is there a way to make sure that every single page gets redirected to the new .php page on the new site with a 301?

Cheers

[Jean-Luc]

I would not do that.

I would let the .html pages be processed as .php pages by the web server. Key benefit is that the pages keep their names and search engines are not disturbed, while you can add all the PHP stuff you want.

Something like this in .htaccess:

RemoveHandler .html
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .html

Jean-Luc

[lukkyjay]

So you're saying having that in the htaccess of the new site will allow me to actually have php parsed pages but the search engines will only see the .html end result?

Also, how do I go about getting all links to the specific pages in the old site to go directly to the corresponding page in the new site like this: http://www.firstsite.com/specific-page.html gets transferred directly to http://www.secondsite.com/specific-page.php

Is that possible?

[Jean-Luc]

I was assuming that you were able to keep the existing domain name. Do you need to change the domain name ?

If you have to use a new domain name, you will need 301 redirects anyway.

It is almost always better to keep an existing domain name, at least, if you own it. If the domain belongs to your hosting company or another third party, you obvioulsy need to replace it by your own. An "old" domain with a good reputation always performs better than a new domain that still has to prove its value to Google.

So you're saying having that in the htaccess of the new site will allow me to actually have php parsed pages but the search engines will only see the .html end result?

I meant that it will allow to have PHP content within .html pages and they will be parsed as regular .php pages.

Jean-Luc

[wige]

Some studies have shown that users may be more inclined to trust short (what we on this forum would probably call search engine friendly) URLs in search engine results, especially when they end with .html, so as Jean-Luc showed with his code, you would probably want to keep the .html extension if possible.

If you do need to move to another domain, you would set up the redirects as follows:

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

And on your new domain, to prevent canonical issues, I would recommend the following code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond {HTTP_HOST} ^yournewdomain.com$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://www.yournewdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^/(.*)/\.index\.html http://www.yournewdomain.com/$1/ [R=301, L]

[Philomena Ojikutu]

Thanks guys, I really benefit from this, as I am planning in few days time to move from blogspot to my own domain and would also love to keep all my IBL. My extension would however remain html

[lukkyjay]

I've had the original domain name for about 5 years now and it has everything (for SEO) but the keywords in the domain name. I bought the new, keyword rich domain name from a previous owner about two years ago now. When I first bought it, all I did was give it some basic content and it was immediately pretty high in the rankings from just 3 IBL's the previous owner had into it.

I have a wordpress blog on the original site which is very big now (about 18 months old) with a lot of links into it, and all of the other pages are .html. A lot of the html pages have very good PR (I say that as a quick way to let you know they're established and recognized) and a lot of good IBL's - but I have the need to do some php script on them.

A lot of the blog posts have created good link bait and I have a lot of links out there for all of the pages in general. So I'm looking to have people that click on links to blog posts and other html pages to be taken to the exact page they were looking for - except under the new domain name base. I also want to make sure that those pages have their trust and rankings transferred over to the identical pages at the new domain.

I didn't want to go into too much detail at first, but it is complicated. Hopefully, I've explained well enough now. If not let me know if you have questions. If it all makes sense to you, how would you handle this situation?