If a website moves permanently and, for example, the domain changes, the new address can be notified to the search engines and web browsers via a 301 redirect.

If a blog exists for a certain time, there are many links on the web. If the url changes, all links become invalid. Visitors are directed to the unloved 404 page as well as to the search engines. Thus the page sinks in the ranking of the search engines and in the reputation of the visitors.

Now visitors will not only be redirected to the new site, but at the same time the information will be shared that this move is permanent. Of course every existing link should be considered.

Every old link should automatically refer to the new blog. For example, the link should refer from https://buecher.fl-e.de/2019/02/21/thriller-einer-wird-sterben/ to https://buechernarr.org/2019/02/21/thriller-einer-wird-sterben/.

Plugins

There are plugins that are supposed to do this for you, but these redirect plugins all did not work reliably. Single redirects were no problem, but who wants to define more than 250 redirects by hand? It’s quite possible that the plugins were not set up correctly, but we didn’t find any instructions on how to use wildcard plugins to take all links into account.

For this reason we have set up a 301 redirect directly via .htaccess.

Attention: In order for the redirections to work permanently, you must remain the domain owner of the old domain! If the domain is cancelled or released, all files on the server will also be deleted – including the .htaccess file. As a result, the redirects no longer work.

On the server of buecher.fl-e.de (the old server) there must be a .htaccess file with the following content:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (.*)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://buechernarr.org/$1 [L,R=301]

https://buechernarr.org must of course be replaced by your own url.

Such a 301 redirection can be set up not only for a domain move where the blog structure has remained the same, but also for an SSL setup or if the directories on a server have changed.

 

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