[Coop]

If you really want to use php, there are several ways to do it. The simplist is with a straight 301 redirect with

<?php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.domain.org/index.php");
?>

Obviously replacing http://www.domain.org/index.php with the URL you want to redirect to. To use this method, the file must replace the original file you are wanting to redirect from.


A more flexible method is to use a map. The advantage of this is that it has a default URL that redirects, typically, to your home page (prevents loss of traffic when pages are moved or deleted). In addition, the map allows you to effectively redirect from multiple URL's to there new location.

<?php
$map = array(
'/old/1.html' => '/new/2.html',
'/old/2.php' => '/newlocation/3.html');

if (isset($map[$_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL']])) {
    $new_loc = 'http://' .
               $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] .
               $map[$_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL']];
    if (isset($_SERVER['REDIRECT_QUERY_STRING'])) {
        $new_loc .= '?' .
                    $_SERVER['REDIRECT_QUERY_STRING'];
    }
    header("Location: $new_loc");
} else {
    header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
    header("Location: ".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);
}
?>

You should save this as error.php in the root directory of your site, and then add an .htaccess file with the following directive :

ErrorDocument 404 /error.php

That is just to handle 404 errors, you can also add additional error codes if you wish. With this script, if there is no map for the missing page, then you get 301 redirected to the home page of the site. However, if the missing page is one of the pages mapped in the map array, the script will 301 redirect you to that page instead.

These scripts are most useful when the new loocation on your site does not mirror the structure of the original location.

HTH