Domain Name change snafu

RapidWeaver Classic General
1

Greetings,

Don’t do the domain switch often so here goes:

Client had

www.mybrookwood.com (old)

client purchased

www.brookwood.golf (new)

Last year (using Little Oak hosting) I pointed www.mybrookwood.com to www.brookwood.golf, they let the old domain name expire, I uploaded the site to the new domain name today works just fine but…

If you google the golf club it still shows www.mybrookwood.com which of course now does not work so the question is:

  1. Just renew the old domain and point it to the new domain/website

or

  1. 301 redirects which I have not a clue how to do or it won’t work anyway because the old doman expired

Seems the least amount of hassle to just renew the old domain.

Your thoughts?

Thanks,

Rich

2

Since you haven’t done the 301’s yet, you will have to renew the old URL for now. If you put the 301 redirects in and the old URL expires, everything (Google, Bing, etc.) will not get the redirects.

So the short answer is to renew the old domain, and then put in the 301 redirects going to the surviving domain.
Right now you simply have to domains pointing to the same pages; this will get you dinged as duplicate content.

After the redirects have been live for a while recheck to see if the old domain has dropped.

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3

Doug,

Thanks for your quick response, that is what I thought, will do that shortly (domain renewal).

Didn’t see a good explanation (searched the forum) to implement 301 redirects.

Never have done it.

Rich

4

Take a look at these two videos



One of them should talk about redirects but not sure which.

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5

The videos @zeebe posted will give you the idea. You need to renew that domain (it’s going to an expired warning page).

You’ll need to add a .htaccess file to your root directory. Little Oak as some knowledge base articles if I remember on some of that.

Something like this in your htaccess file should work:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mybrookwood.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^brookwood.golf [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mybrookwood.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.brookwood.golf/$1 [L,R=301,NC]

The above should redirect your old URL to the new (also will force WWW).

I have not tested it so you may want to put together a test script with links to all your old URL’s pages and see if they work ok.
You can unit test htaccess files here:
http://htaccess.madewithlove.be
Always take care with 301’s as they don’t expire and can get cached for a long time. I alway set them to a 302 (temp) until I have tested completely.

1 Like
6

Thank you very much, I will view both of these.

Rich

7

Doug,

Thanks for the information I sincerely appreciate it.

Domain renewed.

Rich

8

htaccess Tester - madewithlove.jpg3086×1884 411 KB

That code appears to have worked

9

Okay after taking care of the old domain renewal (old domain site is now live) and uploading the required .htaccess file properly I get the dreaded “Internal Server Error” mesaage if I remove the .htaccess file it all returns to normal.

10

How did you create the .htaccess file?
Needs to be plain text.
Make sure you copied everything, may have cropped a character.

A 500 internal error on an htacess file is usually a bad rule, or typos.

1 Like
11

Doug,

This is now working, you were correct I created it in TextEdit but neglected to select all and format in “Plain Text”.

Uploaded it and it is now redirecting from mybrookwood.com to brookwood.golf.

Thank you very much with your help and patience with me on this.

Regards,

Rich

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13

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