Hi all, I'm stuck with a wee search engine problem. I have a site that was once on domain x, with old-fashioned URLs, and is now on domain y with nice semantic URLs. The content on the new site is largely different, but there's a PHP-based lookup of the old URL patterns that will redirect people to an equivalent page (where one exists) on the new site with a 301 redirect.
I issue a straight 301using a rewrite rule from domain x to the same path on domain y to kick things off. Now the problem I'm having is that for pages that don't have a "legacy redirect" in PHP, they hit the old URL on domain x, get a 301 to the same URL on domain y, but then receive a 410 page because there is no redirect available, but it recognises the old URL pattern as having been valid before. Humans deal with this well, because the end result is a nice page explaining how to search for what they want, etc, but search engines (at least Ask and MSN) have been continuously trying to hit the old URL on domain x for over a year now, even though it 301s to a 410. I'm trying to find a solution to make those search engines stop trying to index the old URLs. I recall that I've seen that mod_rewrite can do a proxy-check of the destination URL before it redirects, and bail out of the rule if the client would be redirected to a non-200, but I can't find this in the redirect documentation at a glance... I guess another option would be a robots.txt that serves up just for domain x that disallows the search engines on that domain entirely? Any ideas? Neil --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
