How to redirect a website from a folder to the root folder?

Question

I was running a website on a folder (www.example.com/folder). The new version of the website is live and runs on the root folder.

How should I redirect users who visit the website using the old URLs (either because they bookmarked it or through search engines)?

And in the long term, can I 'clean' the search engines results by removing the old links that show up?

Answer 1

If you use Apache you could use ModRewrite. Just put this in your .htaccess file in your root directory:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/?folder/(.*)$ $1 [NE,R]

Answer 2

You can use a 301 redirect in your htaccess which is the most appropriate to denote that something has moved (mostly search engine wise).

Just put a line like this in the drupal .htaccess or even create a separate .htaccess in the folder you user (if you still have it)

    redirect 301 /your_folder http://www.yourdomain.com/

What I usually do with drupal is have it in a subfolder and when I am ready to move it to the main domain I just create an .htaccess file in the root directory with rewriting and never move the actual files. I have found that this is more convenient especially when wanting to change the main domain content fast (say restore from a backup, without messing with existing files, create a new dir and change .htaccess to point to that).

my .htaccess looks like:

    Options -Indexes
    Options +FollowSymLinks

    RewriteEngine on

    # Redirect all user to WWW
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

    # Serve Drupal 7 from sub directory in web root
    RewriteRule ^$ my_folder/index.php [L]
    RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/my_folder%{REQUEST_URI} -f
    RewriteRule .* my_folder/$0 [L]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule .* my_folder/index.php?q=$0 [QSA]