Originally Posted by A Site with too many flashy banners

Redirects Ever go through the nightmare of changing significantly portions of your site, then having to deal with the problem of people finding their way from the old pages to the new? It can be nasty. There are different ways of redirecting pages, through http-equiv, javascript or any of the server-side languages. And then you can do it through htaccess, which is probably the most effective, considering the minimal amount of work required to do it.

htaccess uses redirect to look for any request for a specific page (or a non-specific location, though this can cause infinite loops) and if it finds that request, it forwards it to a new page you have specified:

Redirect /olddirectory/oldfile.html http://yoursite.com/newdirectory/newfile.html

Note that there are 3 parts to that, which should all be on one line : the Redirect command, the location of the file/directory you want redirected relative to the root of your site (/olddirectory/oldfile.html = yoursite.com/olddirectory/oldfile.html) and the full URL of the location you want that request sent to. Each of the 3 is separated by a single space, but all on one line. You can also redirect an entire directory by simple using Redirect /olddirectory http://yoursite.com/newdirectory/

Using this method, you can redirect any number of pages no matter what you do to your directory structure. It is the fastest method that is a global affect.