how do I redirect properly?

Sorry Diablo, I would love to share links with you so you can help me out of this, but unfortunately the website I am talking about is an Adsense one and you know we are not supposed to share our Adsense websites with anybody

Now, about the DNS change, I just did it 40 minutes ago and to this moment there are still no changes (it still loads the old website). The only way I can make the domain name display the new website (that's hosted with another company) is really to just point it to the website's URL.

But when I do this URL forwarding thing (with or without changing the DNS, doesn't make any difference) then all of the pages point to the root domain name (example, www.mywebsite.com) instead of pointing to their specific URLs.

Also, about what you said

"I have no clue about cpnael. But if you redirect xyz.com to another site, then when someone clicks a link it's going to go back to the other site because that is where dns is pointed to for xyz.com. In that cpanel may be redirecting xyz.com, but not xyz.com/xxx/xxx.html. But I could be wrong since I don't know cpanel"

I can say that you are wrong about this particular case. I did redirect xyz.com to another site (the URL of the site that is) and when someone clicked (I did) a link it didn't go back to the old site like you said it would, it just went to the new site

Here's an example of what my problems really are.

Let's say that my site is in the health niche, and that it has pages like this (just an example)

myhealthsite.com
myhealthsite.com/teeth
myhealthsite.com/skin
myhealthsite.com/diet

etc, etc

After I make the redirect in the cpanel by choosing to point the domain name myhealthsite.com to a URL and choose stealth (I have no idea what this is but I have 2 redirect options - standard and stealth), then, when I click on the myhealthsite.com name again it does redirect to the URL I made it point to (which is obviously the URL of the home page for the new website, that is hosted on a different company than the one where the domain name is).

So, I do this "point to an URL" thing and it does point the domain to the home page of the new site, just as it should. But when I click on a link on my website that refers to a specific page, I am being taken to that page indeed but in the address bar of the browser it continues to show the root domain name (myhealthsite.com). And this happens for any link I click on and the corresponding page I am being taken to.

Also, while on a page (other than the home page) and I refresh the browser I am being taken back to the home page.

And that's still not all

Every time I hover over a link that points to another page on my website, it shows down right in the browser the real URL of the page where the link points to, instead of showing the new redirected URL. Here's what I mean.

Say for example that my new website is created at this address:

http://myhostingaccountusername.hostingcompanyB.com/myhealthsite

Well, if I am on the page myhealthsite.com/teeth (just an example) and on this page there is a link to another page - myhealthsite.com/diet, then every time I hover the mouse over the link that points to the diet page, it will display http://myhostingaccountusername.hostingcompanyB.com/myhealthsite/diet instead of displaying myhealthsite.com/diet (like it's normal).

I hope I didn't confuse you too much, but instead made you see what I mean. I am not even sure if this is a redirection, DNS, or database problem anymore. If only I new what it was, I might be able to rectify it somehow

Oh well, I will see what your suggestions are.

Thanks

Hey Harrison,

thanks for your tips. I undid that already, because it didn't solve my problem.

Now, about the redirection. I didn't change the domain name. The domain stays the same, It's the website that changed. I saw some instruction in my "google webmasters tools" account on how to deal with changes of address (domain name that is) but that's not my issue.

My domain name will remain the same, I just want it to point to a different website that really is different, in every little aspect of it.

The old website was nothing more than a 30 page (.php) website in the health niche, that was not on WP, and that didn't even have about-us, contact, TOS, or even a home page. All it had was 30 pages of text with 2 Adsense ad units on them and that was all.

But the new site instead, it's on WP and it has 25 posts already, plus category pages, and the additional contact-us, about-us, privacy policy, sitemap, etc. pages. And I really need to keep the domain name that already has PR and some organic traffic coming to it, but to make it point to the new website.

And the problem is that I first had to create this new website on a different database, folder and hosting account than the one where the domain name is. And probably that's where my problems come from. If I had installed WP and set up this new site directly in the folder to which the domain name points (like I did for other dozens of WP installations before) I probably didn't run into this issue.

But I couldn't do this since I would have risked losing traffic and revenue while re-building the site from the ground up. It took me over a month to do it anyway (I am single guy, with very little income that needs to do everything on his own - design, programming, SEO, etc).

As you can see, if I did this the "right" way that I knew for sure it would work, it would've taken me over a month, in which time I could have risked losing the SE rankings, not to mention the traffic and more importantly the revenue, which is not much but it's what keeps me alive, so to speak.

I am not sure if this is a database issue, a DNS issue, or even a redirection issue caused by the plugin or by the misuse of the plugin. I don't totally exclude the possibility of me not using the plugin correctly, since I am not too familiar with all the options in it anyway.

I am using the "redirection" plugin which I assume is the best and most popular of them all, but even though it is pretty easy to use, I still don't know what all of those options do, and when/if I should use them. I refer here to the "match URL and referrer only" or "match URL and user agent only" and stuff. Or the "regular expression" and "regex" check boxes, which I have no clue if I should tick them or not, and what they do i I tick them

Hope I could make this even clearer than before.

Thanks again for any suggestions and I look forward to hearing even more of them, if possible (actually, I only look forward to fix this once and for all)

John

Because I wanted to change the hosting and because I didn't plan everything ahead. I only asked myself how I will do the redirection in order not to disturb anything (traffic and revenue levels, SE rankings, and PR) only when I almost completed the new site. And the work on the new site took me over a month to do and I don't feel like doing it again. I have other dozens of sites too that I need to take care of

I know you are right but like I said, I didn't think about this beforehand and now I have to find a way to "fix" it

It wasn't as simple as that because it was something database related, and if it's database related it's not simple. At least in what concerns me

But I fixed the issue (actually my hosting provider did) and I am Ok now.

Thanks for taking time to help. It feels nice to find people willing to help you with the most difficult things