Doing .htaccess Redirection

I've been rolling up my sleeves playing with server stuff directly for the first time in ages, and I wanted to redirect any requests for any files within a particular directory of my consulting site Calafia to a new location. Time to do some learning.

I'm dealing with Apache, so the basic documentation on using redirection was helpful. Within a minute, I had any requests for something like http://olddomain.com/olddirectory going to http://newdomain/.

The problem was, any requests for a particular file were trying to locate the same file name at the new domain. In other words, http://olddomain.com/olddirectory/fileabc.html would bring up http://newdomain/fileabc.html. Since the new domain had no fileabc.html, errors started happening.

Back to the research. What I really needed was a way to redirect all files within a folder to a single location. I did a search, and surprise! It's Aaron Wall's SEO Book site to the rescue. .htaccess, 301 Redirects & SEO: Guest Post by NotSleepy covered how to rewrite all files within a folder to a single file. Once I had that down, I redirected requests for that single file to the new domain. Voila -- all done. And don't I feel cool having done a rewrite! My code, by the way:

I'm sure there's a better way to do this (if so, just say below in comments), but it worked, and I didn't have to ask anyone!

Just out of curiosity, why a 302 instead of a 301?

I haven't been into my .htaccess file since I was doing password protection a year ago, so you're a braver man than me. ;)

Comment by Matt Cutts | September 10, 2006 10:45 PM

I don't know if this is better, but it's simpler.

RedirectMatch 301 /directory/.* http://www.newdomain.com/

Comment by JEHochman | September 11, 2006 5:53 AM

Hey Matt, went 302 temporary redirect because I don't know permanently yet where want to point those old files yet. Once I do, I'll go 301.

JE, excellent, thanks! Worked great and switched to it with one change:

RedirectMatch 302 /directory.* http://newdomain

I found what you suggested worked except if someone entered http://olddomain/directory without the trailing slash. I suspect that what I've done is made any thing on my server that starts with that directory name now redirect, but it's a unique name, so I'm OK.

Comment by Danny Sullivan | September 11, 2006 1:17 PM

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