Setting up a seamless divert from old shop!

[Kultya]

Hi Folks

I have an old crappy site still up but empty at www.kultya.com/catalog .

It is quite high up on Google so obviously anyone searching for the stuff that we sell will find our site and assume we have gone.

Anyone know the simplest way to divert it.

I thought about just copying the index page from my Actinic home page and dumping it in there as www.kultya.com/catalog/index.htm but not sure that would work!

Thanks in advance!

Malc

[meden]

I imagine that using a .htaccess redirect file in your site root would be the simplest solution (if your host allows you)

[wjcampbe]

Personally, I'd use a 301 rediect, so that the search engines and human visitors ALL find the new content. The 301 will tell the search engines this is a permanent replacement, and should result in transfer of existing trust rank etc.

[Kultya]

Its ok, I finally got there. I had to close the old shop down once I'd figured out how to get the customers records from it.

Then it automatically diverted to Actinic by itself which was weird but it was taking it to the acatalog page and not the home page. So I created a divert page and gave it the title catalog.html, plus I made a 404 error page divert to pick up all the rest, it seemms to work ok!

Thanks
Malc

[wjcampbe]

Never noticed both old and new sites were actually on the same domain....

No redirection needed.

BUT

If you are now diverting all 404 errors to the new home page, Google for one will not like you. They want a specific 404.html page.

Better to duplicate your sitemap.html page, add some text at the top explaining the change and inviting people to 'use any of the links below to enter our new site' and upload that as 404.html.