How can I redirect properly?

Question

Long story short I replaced an outdated site with a Drupal site at its previous url, let's say oldsite.org. But the old site was also accessed from oldsite.org/THIS, I think because it was a subdirectory of a larger site or something. But there are old links around that use oldsite.org/THIS and we want those to go to the homepage of the new site.

What is the proper Drupal way to do this redirect? I have thought of a handful of possible hacks, but I want to do it right. Maybe a small module to handle the redirect. Or even htaccess somehow?

Answer 1

301 redirects are considered the best way to handle redirected pages, for they inform search engines to update their databases with the new paths. Edit your .htaccess file in a text editor. [Note: Be sure to save the file in "UTF-8" format.]

In the file, you will find the commands:

# Various rewrite rules.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on
  # Modify the RewriteBase if you are using Drupal in a subdirectory and
  # the rewrite rules are not working properly.
  #RewriteBase /drupal
RewriteBase /

Immediately after that code -- and before the Drupal-provided "Rewrite old-style URLs" commands -- add your rewrite rules using the following format:

#custom redirects
RewriteRule ^old/URL/path$ http://example.com/new/path [R=301,L]
#end custom redirects

For detailed discussion https://drupal.org/node/38960

Answer 2

You can use Redirect module for this. You can set redirection path with status such as 301 etc..

For .htaccess redirect, you can take help from this documentation.