301 Redirect urls using htaccess

Have you ever created a new website for a client and needed to forward old url pages to their new urls, in order to update google and the other search engines.

 Example 1.

www.your_website.com/your_old_page.html

to

www.your_website.com/your_new_page.html

Based on the above information, edit the .htaccess file add the following:

redirect 301 /your_old_page.html http://www.your_website.com/your_new_page.html

Things to note are the old page doesn't need to be the full url address, but the new page does.

 Example 2.

Here is another example which forwards the whole contents of a folder to a new url.

www.your_website.com/forum/

to

www.your_website.com/blog/

RewriteRule ^forum/(.*) http://www.your_website.com/blog/ [R=301,L]