Redirect Using 301 or 302?

I recently moved my cool online stores.com to a new domain name, interne toutput.com. I don't know what will happen. According to Matt Cutts' blog, this should be avoided. But if you really need to move your old website to a new domain like me. The best thing I learned is using 301 redirect ( permanently moved) but not 302 redirect (temporarily moved). Redirects using 301 will preserve your current search engine rankings of your pages or a website. It will also make your site search engines friendly too. Here is a tool you can test your redirects for search engines friendly or not: Search Engine Friendly Redirect Checker.

The redirections of my old site were taking place within the same host. Implementation was kind of tricky. First of all I tried to use Redirects within HostMonster.com which is my hosting server. It only redirected the old domain name to the new domain name. Although I redirected all other pages as well, non of them was working. So this was not good for me. I needed each page to be correspondent redirected to the new domain. For example, I wanted http://mycoolonlinestores.com/List-of-Clickbank-Products.html to be redirected to http://internetoutput.com/List-of-Clickbank-Products.html and any other pages as well.

I have tried for many times and it kept giving me errors. Finally this article saved my life: 301 Permanent Redirect by Brian V. Bonini. All I did was putting RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.internetoutput.com/$1 [R=301,L] right after this line RewriteEngine On in my .htaccess file under my old website's directory; and each of the pages worked like a charm. So I am happy these redirect problems were solved that I can move on to other issues. As always your comments are welcome!

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