Redirecting hosted site

[buspassjohn]

Can anyone tell me how to do this?
We have a hosted (in USA) site with .com address, we only have access to the control panel and cannot put code on the server.
We want to redirect traffic from existing Search Engines (historic Urls) to our Actinic .co.uk site. I have changed the DNS tags to our co.uk server, this takes care of new traffic addressed only to the bare Url www.prezziesplus.com but not those addressed to specific products.
I have put a 404 redirect on the Actinic server, feeding to the Actinic front page but this directs all 404 errors back to the front page and is putting Robots looking for Robots.txt (we don't have one) in a loop and they seem to be just going away without crawling the site.
I understand I shoud be using a 301 permanent redirect for the .com site but everything I read seems to say it should go on the server that you are redirecting from, this is the one we don't have access to.
I am tearing out the few hairs I have left trying to solve this, I'm sure its easy for one of you clever people out there but I knew nothing about any of this a few months ago and time is against me in catching up.

[jont]

Stange that you cannot put code on the server - are you are able to upload HTML pages or even FTP to the site?

[buspassjohn]

Stange that you cannot put code on the server - are you are able to upload HTML pages or even FTP to the site?

It's a package that we started with to test the water, we can only load products and choose styles etc, see http://www.easywebstore.co.uk/easywebstore/index.htm ..We can load anything on the new Actinic server which is based in the uk and I believe is running Apache.
The other problem is that as soon as the tags are redirected, the site ceases to exist.

[jont]

Nightmare!

If you still want the .COM site it would be worth transferring to another host to give you better control. Otherwise you could hardcode a link into a fragment informing people of the new site and product URL so they can click through to the same page on the .CO.UK site - that way you maintain the historic URL's for each product you need from a search engine query to the .COM site

[buspassjohn]

I don't want the.com site but am reluctant to lose all the listings for products in the the search engines. We are not able add code to the site so cannot have fragments.

[jont]

If you can load products can you not add HTML to the product description linking to the new URL?

Eg

!!<<a href="http://www.prezziesplus.co.uk/acatalog/CUSHTIE.html#aPRODUCTREF">Click for New Site</a>>!!

the bits to change are

CUSHTIE.html is the section name
PRODUCTREF - replace for the actual product reference but with an "a" in front of it.

If you paste that into the product description the user will see the "Click for New Site" text as a hyper link and takes you straight to the same produt on the .CO.UK site.

If you don't want to do this for every product then remove the "#aPRODUCTREF" part and take people to the same section and just copy and paste the same code into that sections product dscriptions.. repeat for each section accordingly.

HTH

[wjcampbe]

If you bought the com domain, you need to ask your new host and old host to cooperate in getting your .com address pointed to your new nameservers and parked on the new domain. Once that is done, you can use an htaccess file to do permanent redirects pointing each old page to the new Actinic addresses.

If the old host refuses the transfer, do a search on domain transfer and see what options are open to you.

[buspassjohn]

This is one of the .com search engine Urls www.prezziesplus.com/ contentcollectionpage~Type~2~Category~9152.aspx . These are not a problem as they are redirected by the 404 to .co.uk site automatically.
The problem is the Search Engines are looking for robots.txt, not finding one and getting a 404 to the front page of .co.uk.
This they seem to hate and promptly go away, I think I will have to put a robots.txt on the Actinic server www.prezziesplus.co.uk and just let the other searches/errors be handled by the 404, can't put code on each product as there are 650 and rising.

[buspassjohn]

If you bought the com domain, you need to ask your new host and old host to cooperate in getting your .com address pointed to your new nameservers and parked on the new domain. Once that is done, you can use an htaccess file to do permanent redirects pointing each old page to the new Actinic addresses.

If the old host refuses the transfer, do a search on domain transfer and see what options are open to you.

Sorry Bill, either I'm not expressing myself clearly or you didn't read the original query re 301's & Robots.
No problem with tags, but the .com site is a hosted package, not accessible to us, rented on a monthly basis.

[jont]

can't put code on each product as there are 650 and rising.

If you don't want to do that (Bills suggestion is similar but slightly less work invloved if you are re-directing to a section and not specific products) then bite the bullet and retire the .COM site and let the search engines pick up the .CO.UK site eventually - at the moment as you are so restricted with the hosting package and you don't actually want the .COM site that has to be the solution.

You could transfer the domain to another host and set up the re-direct there if you are worried about losing the .COM search results - this is still delaying the inevitable as the search results are pointing to a product on .COM which wont actually be there and will take the user to say the homepage of the .CO.UK site

[jont]

there are 650 and rising.

I am now confused... why are the product numbers rising on the .COM if you don't want the .COM site? Surely this is just exacerbating the situation

[buspassjohn]

Oops! yes of corse they are only rising on the Actinic site, sorry