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My friend would like to change her domain oldsite.com to newsite.com.

The hosting company is lukrativedomains and they suggested changing the domain to newsite.com and then forwarding oldsite.com to newsite.com

However, the forwarding feature they offer will redirect all pages to the root newsite.com. I want to be able to forward all the individual pages of oldsite.com to the same page on newsite.com

Do I need to copy the content from oldsite.com to newsite.com and then implement a 301 redirect? If so, how do I do that and would that be duplicate content?

Also, how would I go about doing the 301 redirects for each page? What do I need from her? (htaccess? if so where would that be?)

As of right now, newsite.com does not have anything on it, it is just a parked page but I want it to look exactly like oldsite.com.

It is very important to do this while minimizing effects on SEO. She does not use wordpress, in fact, I am not really sure where the content lives (I am guessing on ftp somewhere)

ahms
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  • If the URL structure below the domain name stays the same, then a simple [`RedirectPermanent`](http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/en/mod/mod_alias.html#redirectpermanent) `/ http://newsite.com/` placed in an `.htaccess` file on the root level of the old domain should do the job perfectly fine. You should check in advance with the hosting company that hosts the old domain whether you are allowed to use .htaccess and that directive. – CBroe Feb 24 '15 at 23:53

1 Answers1

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here are my steps that i would do in this case

  1. Create a full site backup (files and databases)
  2. Upload them to the new site and check that everything works fine.
  3. In the root folder (usually if you are using Cpanel that would be the public_html folder) i would create and .htaccess file with the 301 redirections

Code example:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^oldpage.html$ http://www.newsite.com/newpage.html [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

Take a good look at the 3ed line whats going on, I say RewriteRule and then "^" and the name of the page, that looks like in full url like this: http://www.oldsite.com/oldpage.html

So for example lets say that you want to redirect this url: http://www.oldsite.com/categories/business/news.html You would put it like this:

RewriteRule ^categories/business/news.html$ http://www.newsite.com/categories/business/news.html [R=301,L]

If it does not end with .html .php it would look like this:

RewriteRule ^categories/business/news/$ http://www.newsite.com/categories/business/news/ [R=301,L]

Also if you would like to learn a bit more about redirections i would suggest reading this article: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

Igor Aleksic
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