Migrating from another CMS to C5 and not losing Google rankings

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I feel like I have seen this on here somewhere, but can't find it.

There are a lot of forum posts I can find with examples of using htaccess for specific things, but if editing htaccess is what I need to do, I can't find any that show how to do "this url to this url".

Of course htaccess may not be the way anyway.

The site I am migrating at the moment is hosted on a 3rd party server (pointed at through appropriate DNS records, which I control), but the new C5 site is on our server, so I can't switch over until everything is setup ready to go (ie. I can't have the old and new site on the same server). We have worked with the customer for a while now and have good SEO and don't want to lose it all.

The current site only has 40 pages and they have (fundamentally) been replicated on C5.

Can anyone please give me the detail of what I need to do, or simply point me at a forum that they think details this. Thanks.

BrettDashwood
 
JohntheFish replied on at Permalink Reply
JohntheFish
The URL director addon does everything you need and tracks any that you miss.

http://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/url-director/...
ConcreteOwl replied on at Permalink Best Answer Reply
ConcreteOwl
Using htaccess to do 301 redirects is easy enough..
Try this
## Place this .htaccess file in the root of the old website
## Examples below
## From a sub-directory to new location
Redirect 301 /old_directory/old_file.html http://www.new_domain.co.uk/new_directory/new_file.html
## From root to new root location 
Redirect 301 /old_file.html http://www.new_domain.co.uk/new_file.html

Note the space between the old url and the new url..
BrettDashwood replied on at Permalink Reply
BrettDashwood
Thanks weyboat.

I ended up using the add-on SEO: 301 Redirects for the project, mainly because it easily imported my spreadsheet and I could work in the UI of the dashboard.

I'm sure that modifying .htaccess like this would have been easy enough, but for the first time in this situation, $18 wasn't a hard call.