Question

I need a little help with my .htaccess before I deploy it!

I want to 301 redirect almost everything from elementalthreads.com to ethreads.com, excluding blog/wp-content/uploads, and /pommo.

Am I doing this right?:

RewriteEngine on
#exclude old uploads folder and /pommo
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(blog/wp-content/uploads|pommo) [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://ethreads.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Will that transfer canonical pagerank?

Here’s where I know I need help:

1. The old site has a wordpress blog, which I’ve cloned on the new domain. I’d love to preserve the permalinks, which are almost 1:1, eg:
   http://www.elementalthreads.com/blog/ethreads-now-on-amazon-com/ redirects to
   http://ethreads.com/ethreads-now-on-amazon-com/ (note /blog/ is missing here)

2. And the blog index http://www.elementalthreads.com/blog/ should redirect to http://ethreads.com/blog/, which seems like an exception to the above rule, since “/blog/” should only be preserved here?

I’m stumped about how to regEx or otherwise define these last two conditions/rules. Any help would be most appreciated!

Answer 1

That looks correct to me. However, you should not put this live without checking it, there really is nothing preventing you from being able to test it. One thing to bare in mind is that browsers can cache 301 response codes so when testing you should use [R,L] as your flags. Once you are happy add the [R=301,L] back in before deployment.

OK for points (1) & (2)

# only redirect the blog direcotry
RewriteRule ^blog/?$            http://ethreads.com/blog/ [NC,R=301,L]

# redirect all sub folders of blog to the new domain
RewriteRule ^blog/([\w-])/?$    http://ethreads.com/$1/ [NC,R=301,L]