I am re-branding my one website into a new domain, and just saw a full guide of Google Webmaster Tools on Change of Address of site… They say that we have to 301 redirect each page of old site to new site.
They recommend it to do form server side 301 redirect involving .htacess.
My question what is the best practice to perform this task. Additionally, I have found this WP Plugin Redirection promising to do this task for me finding 404 errors, poinitng it to me and then I would be redirecting it to new site.
Should I go for server side or the plugin or… what would be the best practice to look for ?
old site = old domain
new site = new domain
I may be wrong, but it looks like the plugin is for when you’re moving your blog from one domain to another. i.e. It will have all of the old content in the same site structure, plus added new posts/pages.
And I again may be wrong, but it looks like the search bots will need to hit each and every URL of the old site to get the “moved permanently” message.
Over the years I have removed some pages and given them “moved” and “gone” headers. Yet even now some of those pages get called. Months and even years for some bots. I guess there are pages with links to them and the bots find them that way. Still, I wish they’d get the message and remember it!
So I think if it was me I’d keep the old domain and simply redirect every request to it to the new domain using a simple htaccess file. That way if the same relative path exists, fine. If it doesn’t you could send them to the index, sitemap or search page.
I have found a simple way to do that by inserting a php code… but now the problem is… each post or my WP blog is redirected to the main blog.
Is there any way I can redirect each post of old domain name to same post present on my new domain ?
like
my-old-domain.com/wonderful-tips-nokia/
to
my-new-domain.com/wonderful-tips-nokia/