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[venta]

I recently moved my dance team's website from some old free space which came with an ntl line in 1999 (and was only accessible via dial-up!) to something a bit more 21st century. Accordingly, I've put up a redirect page so that http://www.eastwick.fsnet.co.uk/mabel redirects to http://www.mabelgubbins.co.uk

However, a quick google suggests that there are a few pages which turn up quite high in the search queries (like our recipe for damson gin!) Including people's private bookmarks, there will be quite a few links to specific pages which have now gone away - and I've only redirected index.html

Is there a good way of catching eastwick.fsnet.co.uk/anything.html and sending it to index.html (or straight to the new site), or do I need to manually add redirect pages for every single page which used to exist? Assume I know nothing about clever scripty things (and also assume quite a lot of clever scripty things won't be supported).

Any tips for how to ensure that when people search for "mabel gubbins" the new site appears in preferece to the old one also appreciated. What I know about SEO could be written in quite large letters on a postage stamp.

Comments

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

you'll need to create an account IIRC, but you can then report that a page or domain no longer exists (and/or that they no longer contain specific search terms), and they'll send ninja webcrawlers to verify and then remove those pages from theor search results & cache. I think they warn it may take up to 90 days, but IME it's rather quicker than that, and I suspect them reserve the 90 day thing to allow manual checking of potentially malicious requests.

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

(Obviously that only works for google - but other search engines presumably offer similar tools...although I think google is still most people's default search engine, isn't it?)

Redirect

[ewx.livejournal.com]

If fsnet are using Apache and give you a reasonable degree of control then mod_rewrite is the (admittedly quite complicated) answer. Some other web swervers have something similar, but not all. And fsnet might not give you access to the relevant facilities.

Re: Redirect

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, I would be pretty impressed if they would allow that! But if not, she should still be able to do the equivalent in a .htaccess.

Re: Redirect

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Well, it would be controlled from .htaccess anyway, but they'd have to turn it on. Their web server does claim to be Apache so there's some small hope...

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I would say quite good odds actually, since WordPress (sort of) requires mod_rewrite.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

What sea_of_flame says above is all good, and Google Webmaster Tools has a load of other useful stuff too, so well worth getting yourself into.

You might also want to upload a bit of redirection code to the .htaccess file at the old location, for anyone who's got the old link bookmarked (if you think anyone might have). Doesn't have to be for each page individually, you can use a regexp along the lines of:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([^.:]+\.)*eastwick\.fsnet\.co\.uk\.?(:[0-9]*)?$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mabelgubbins.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]
(not tested!)

which effectively supplies a 301 page every time someone requests any file on the old site, and redicrets them to the new front page - this should also be followed and learnt from by any search engine spiders who haven't heard the good news from Google.

(It may be that Freeserve don't allow .htaccess monkeying, in which case this won't work. But worth trying. It may also be that they don't use Apache, in which case there'll be an equiv in whatever they do use.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I'm pretty sure that Freeserve don't allow any monkeying at all. I'm fairly sure I tried messing about with .htaccess a few years back, to no avail. What with Freeserve having been bought by Wannadoo and then been bought by Orange, and no one using dialup any more *and* me not being the official name on the account despite numerous attempts to change it (that's leathellin) it's vaguely impossible to find out anything about what is/isn't allowed/possible on fsnet webspace.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

If you cannot use .htaccess or edit the Apache http.conf file (definitely not) then your only option is page-by-page redirection using meta tags or similar.

However, you might be able to do a sly thing where you write a single page using JavaScript which gets the current URL and then redirects to a destination page calculated based on that URL. That way if you have hundreds of pages to redirect you at least only have to write one new one and then copy it lots of times.