• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Technical SEO
        4. Any way around buying hosting for an old domain to 301 redirect to a new domain?

        Moz Q&A is closed.

        After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

        Any way around buying hosting for an old domain to 301 redirect to a new domain?

        Technical SEO
        9
        17
        3612
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • SamTurri
          SamTurri last edited by

          Howdy.

          I have just read this QA thread, so I think I have my answer. But I'm going to ask anyway!

          Basically DomainA.com is being retired, and DomainB.com is going to be launched.

          We're going to have to redirect numerous URLs from DomainA.com to DomainB.com. I think the way to go about this is to continue paying for hosting for DomainA.com, serving a .htaccess from that hosting account, and then hosting DomainB.com separately.

          Anybody know of a way to avoid paying for hosting a .htaccess file on DomainA.com?

          Thanks!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • MarkFasel51
            MarkFasel51 last edited by

            If I am understanding correctly you want people to access DomainA.com when they go to DomainB.com? If this is the case, you could set up DomainB.com as a Domain Forward to DomainA.com.

            For instance a Client I have right now has www.drcharlescrane.com and www.drcharlescrane.net. Hosting is only set up for .com and we domain forward .net.

            You can also have this set up as a domain forwarding with mask so if you wanted the user would actually see in the URL domainb.com but pulling domaina.com's content.

            I hope this makes sense and if you need further clarification let me know. Also where is your domain registered. I use Godaddy primarily to the low costs for domains. Here is a how to domain forward provided by them and more information on the topic - http://help.godaddy.com/article/422

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • AlanMosley
              AlanMosley @SamTurri last edited by

              DNS, resolves a name to a ip number,

              that ip number should route to your website. Inthe headers of the resquest is the domain name, your web site should be configured to accept either all requests on a ip number and port or filtered by host headers (domains names), add all teh host headers needed, then in htaccess 30 to the pirmary domain name.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • SamTurri
                SamTurri @AlanMosley last edited by

                Thank you Alan. Are you suggesting that via DNS records I have DomainA.com "live" in the same place as DomainB.com, and then host the .htaccess on DomainB.com's hosting space?

                So somebody requests DomainA.com, the DNS points to the hosting for DomainB.com, and then the .htaccess for DomainB.com can process the original DomainA.com request?

                AlanMosley 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • SamTurri
                  SamTurri @waqid last edited by

                  Thanks, but does this help with 301s for inner pages?

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • sesertin
                    sesertin @AlanMosley last edited by

                    I had just the same experience. It was only one occasion but I did nothing more to the site then putting it under a new account on my shared hosting, so only the last digit of the ip has changed. I saw a drop in rankings however the original I gained back the original rankings a few weeks later.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • AlanMosley
                      AlanMosley @sesertin last edited by

                      I cant say it does, but when I changed ips i had a drop in rankings. But i cant prove it was the change in ip
                      but there is some logic to it,
                      A domain name is resolved to a ip address to find the website, the domain name is sent in the header. Your web site accepts a connection on a socket, ip number and port 123.123.123.123:80, it then looks in the header for the domain name
                      so a SE will see a difference, it will know this is not the same address

                      sesertin 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • PPCnSEO
                        PPCnSEO @sesertin last edited by

                        100% disagree.

                        Most of the biggest websites in the world use DNS load balancing which will change the IP address of the server every request.

                        301 redirects lose a small amount of juice but IP changes don't.

                        Hosting changes don't (assuming no errors or outages).

                        Who-is changes do, but that is not relevant here.

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • AlanMosley
                          AlanMosley last edited by

                          1. you need to make a change to your DNS settings.

                          where every you registered your domain, you ned to change your Arecord to point at the correct ip number

                          2. you need to do a 301 redirect to primary domain.

                          SamTurri 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                          • waqid
                            waqid last edited by

                            If you have Cpanel here are the instructions. For godaddy or plesk call your host and tell them what you are trying to do.

                            Log into where you purchased domain A and forward it to the name servers at B's hosting. Then go into B Cpanel and click on add on domains. Add your domain. Once the domain has been added go to domain redirects and redirect your old domain to new.

                            For type choose permanent 301

                            Choose the domain you want to redirect from the drop down. Next manually type in your new domain name where it says "redirects to".

                            SamTurri 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • waqid
                              waqid @sesertin last edited by

                              I think I disagree as moving site A's hosting to a new ip causes a drop in rankings.

                              Never heard about this before. I think this is not true, i have chagned IP's in the past without any consequences.

                              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                              • N5c
                                N5c last edited by

                                You shouldn't have to continue to pay for hosting for the site you are getting rid of, just keep renewing the domain name and then 301 it to the new site and you should be fine.

                                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • SamTurri
                                  SamTurri @EGOL last edited by

                                  Thank you. I'm actually not understanding. How do I Park A on B. What is "explicit .htaccess"?

                                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                  • EGOL
                                    EGOL @sesertin last edited by

                                    There is no penalty or loss for changing an IP address. There are many legitimat reasons for doing that. IP changes often occr when your host moves your site to a different server, or, when you upgrade your hosting package, or move to a different hosting service. No worries at all about new IPs.

                                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                                    • cfguti
                                      cfguti last edited by

                                      The .htaccess that have the information about the A domain is inside B hosting, so, you don't need anymore A hosting when you do all the redirections.

                                      I think this post can help:

                                      http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067216/The-10-Step-Site-Migration-Process

                                      bye

                                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                                      • sesertin
                                        sesertin last edited by

                                        Egol has usually got great answers that woths linstening to, this time however I think I disagree as moving site A's hosting to a new ip causes a drop in rankings. Put the redirection on top of that and you get some more fallback. I think in the above case I would not change the hosting but do the redirect and wait for google to notice the change. Maybe a few months later I would give up site A's original hosting and migrate it to site B's hosting to be able to keep the original urls live for some more time.

                                        EGOL waqid PPCnSEO AlanMosley 4 Replies Last reply Reply Quote -2
                                        • EGOL
                                          EGOL last edited by

                                          Park A on B and redirect with explicit .htaccess.

                                          SamTurri 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
                                          • 1 / 1
                                          • First post
                                            Last post

                                          Browse Questions

                                          Explore more categories

                                          • Moz Tools

                                            Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                                          • SEO Tactics

                                            Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                                          • Community

                                            Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                                          • Digital Marketing

                                            Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                                          • Research & Trends

                                            Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                                          • Support

                                            Connect on product support and feature requests.

                                          • See all categories

                                          Related Questions

                                          • iQi

                                            Google is still indexing the old domain a year after 301 redirects are put in place

                                            Hi there, You might have experienced this before but for me this is the first. A client of mine moved from domain A (www.domainA.com) to domain B (www.domainB.com). 301 redirects are all in place for over a year. But the old domain is still showing in Google when you search for "site:domainA.com" The HTTP Header check shows this result for the URL https://www.domainA.com/company/cookie-policy.aspx HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently => 
                                            Cache-Control => private
                                            Content-Length => 174
                                            Content-Type => text/html; charset=utf-8
                                            Location => https://www.domain_B_.com/legal/cookie-policy
                                            Server => Microsoft-IIS/10.0
                                            X-AspNetMvc-Version => 5.2
                                            X-AspNet-Version => 4.0.30319
                                            X-Powered-By => ASP.NET
                                            Date => Fri, 15 Mar 2019 12:01:33 GMT
                                            Connection => close Does the redirect look wrong? The change of address request was made on Google Console when the website was moved over a year ago. Edit: Checked the domainA.com on bing and it seems that its not indexed, and replaced with domainB.com, which is the right. Just Google is indexing the old domain! Please let me know your thoughts on why this is happening. Best,

                                            Technical SEO | | iQi
                                            0
                                          • LindsayE

                                            What to do with old content after 301 redirect

                                            I'm going through all our blog and FAQ pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones are competing with one another. Basically doing an SEO content clean up. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the page published vs trashing it after you apply a 301 redirect to a better performing page?

                                            Technical SEO | | LindsayE
                                            0
                                          • Cocoonfxmedia

                                            301 Redirect non existant pages

                                            Hi I have 100's of URL's appearing in Search Console for example: ?p=1_1 These go to on to 5_200 etc.. I have tried to do htaccess and the mod rewrite is on as I can redirect directories to the root i.e RewriteRule ^web_example(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,N,L] However I have tried all kinds of variations to redirect ?p= and either it doesn't work at all or it crashes the website. Can anyone point me in the right direction to fix this.

                                            Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia
                                            0
                                          • Rezza

                                            Migrating to new subdomain with new site and new content.

                                            Our marketing department has decided that a new site with new content is needed to launch new products and support our existing ones. We cannot use the same subdomain(www = old subdomain  and ww1 = new subdomain)as there is a technically clash between the windows server currently used, and the lamp stack required to run the new wordpress based CMS and site. We also have an aging piece of SAAS software on the www domain which is makes moving it to it's own subdomain far too risky. 301's have been floated as a way of managing the transition. I'm not too keen on that idea due to the double effect of new subdomain and content, and the SEO impact it might have. I've suggested uploading the new site to the new subdomain while leaving the old site in place. Then gradually migrating sections over before turning parts of the old site off and using a 301 at that point to finalise the move. The old site would inform user's there is a new version and it would then convert them to the new site(along with a cookie to auto redirect them in future.) while still leaving the old content in place for existing search traffic, bookmarks and visitors via static URLs. Before turning off sections on the old site we would create rel canonicals to redirect to the new pages based on a a mapped set of URLs(this in itself concerns me as the rel canonical is essentially linking to different content). Would be grateful for any advice on whether this strategy is flawed or whether another strategy might be more suitable?

                                            Technical SEO | | Rezza
                                            0
                                          • JeanYates

                                            Delete 301 redirected pages from server after redirect is in place?

                                            Should I remove the redirected old pages from my site after the redirects are in place? Google is hating the redirects and we have tanked. I did over 50 redirects this week, consolidating content and making one great page our of 3-10 pages with very little content per page. But the old pages are still visible to google's bot. Also, I have not put a rel canonical to itself on the new pages. Is that necessary? Thanks! Jean

                                            Technical SEO | | JeanYates
                                            0
                                          • kaje

                                            Old URL redirect to New URL

                                            Alright I did something dumb a year a go and I'm still paying for it. I changed my hyphenated URL to the non-hyphenated version when I redesigned my website. I say it was dumb because I lost most of my link juice even though I did 301 redirects (via the htaccess file) for almost all of the pages I could find in Google's index. Here's my problem. My new site took a huge hit in traffic (down 60%) when I made the change and even though I've done thousands of redirects my old site is still showing up in the SERPS and send much if not most of my traffic. I don't want to take the old site down in fear it will kill all of my traffic. What should I do? Is there a better method I should explore then 301 redirects? Could the other site be affecting my current rank since it's still there? (FYI...both sites are built on the WP platform). Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. Thank you! Joe

                                            Technical SEO | | kaje
                                            0
                                          • debi_zyx

                                            SEO Benefit from Redirecting New Exact Match Domains?

                                            Hi, All! This is a question asked in the old Q & A section, but the answer was a little ambiguous and it was about 3 years ago, so I decided to repost and let the knowledgeable SEO public answer... From David LaFerney: It’s clear that it’s much easier to get high rankings for a term if your domain is an exact match for the query. If you own several such domains that are very related such as – investmentrealestate.com, positivecashflow.com, and rentalproperty.com – would you be able to benefit from those by 301ing them to a single site, or would you have to maintain separate sites to help capture those targeted phrases? In a nutshell – SEO wise, is it worth owning multiple domains to exactly match valuable search phrases? Or do you lose the exact match benefit when you redirect?>> To clarify: redirecting an old domain with lots of history and links to a new exact match domain seems to contain SEO benefit.  (You get links+exact match domain, approximately.)  But the other way around? Redirecting a new exact match domain to an older domain with links?  Does that do anything for the ranking of the old domain for the exact match keyword?  Or absolutely nothing?  (My impression has been that it's nothing, but the question came up for a client and I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.) Thanks in advance!

                                            Technical SEO | | debi_zyx
                                            0
                                          • EvergladesDirect

                                            200 Redirects for SEO instead of 301

                                            We are working with a company on re-platforming our website.  On a call yesterday they outlined a strategy to use 200 redirects for our top keywords instead of 301s.  I am not familiar with this type of redirect and was wondering if anyone could provide some more insight.

                                            Technical SEO | | EvergladesDirect
                                            0

                                          Get started with Moz Pro!

                                          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                                          Start my free trial
                                          Products
                                          • Moz Pro
                                          • Moz Local
                                          • Moz API
                                          • Moz Data
                                          • STAT
                                          • Product Updates
                                          Moz Solutions
                                          • SMB Solutions
                                          • Agency Solutions
                                          • Enterprise Solutions
                                          • Digital Marketers
                                          Free SEO Tools
                                          • Domain Authority Checker
                                          • Link Explorer
                                          • Keyword Explorer
                                          • Competitive Research
                                          • Brand Authority Checker
                                          • Local Citation Checker
                                          • MozBar Extension
                                          • MozCast
                                          Resources
                                          • Blog
                                          • SEO Learning Center
                                          • Help Hub
                                          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                                          • How-to Guides
                                          • Moz Academy
                                          • API Docs
                                          About Moz
                                          • About
                                          • Team
                                          • Careers
                                          • Contact
                                          Why Moz
                                          • Case Studies
                                          • Testimonials
                                          Get Involved
                                          • Become an Affiliate
                                          • MozCon
                                          • Webinars
                                          • Practical Marketer Series
                                          • MozPod
                                          Connect with us

                                          Contact the Help team

                                          Join our newsletter
                                          Moz logo
                                          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                                          • Accessibility
                                          • Terms of Use
                                          • Privacy

                                          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.