.htaccess 301 redirect question

[tb987]

I am moving from one forum system to anther, the import is done and the URL structure is completely different.

I have 301 redirect for the main entry pages i.e

Redirect 301 /forum/old.html http ://www.new.com

I don't have time to do this for every page, so I thought I would add the following to the bottom of the list:

Redirect 301 /forum/ http ://www.new.com

The problem is this overrides the individual redirects.

Is there any way round this?

Tony

[Bagi Zoltán]

If the URL structure will be totally different i believe the best solution would be specifying the custom error page affecting the old URLs with the /new/ folder

ErrorDocument 404 /new/

[tb987]

Um not sure what you mean - I just redirected the whole folder in the end - I think the answer was to use conditional rewrite rules which would have been a right pain. Let's see what thes SEs think...

[Bagi Zoltán]

Let me explain. If you had an URL with the old pattern like yourdomain.com/old/showpage?id=5, and now you have this content with the new pattern at yourdomain.com/new/page/5/. If you simply redirect the /old/ folder to the /new/ one the googlebot will get a lot of 404 not found error response, because the webserver won't serve any content for this request yourdomain.com/new/showpage?id=5. This was the reason why i suggest to specify the /new/ folder as the local error page, because that will give a 301 response for the googlebot and let it know that all the relevance and importance of the old URL structure must be passed on to the /new/ folder.

[OldWelshGuy]

whatever you do DO NOT 301 all the pages to the new domain. you are better off throwing thousands of 404 errors.

[tb987]

I have done this OWG - it will be interesting to see what happens. I am expecting traffic to drop off for a while, at least I have a decent forum now which is much more user friendly.

[johnafrankllin]

I think its better to use a 404 error page on old site and redirect it to new one after showing some message like "The Page you are looking has been moved or removed. Browser will redirect you to our new site" or any thing that suites your requirement.