The best resource I have managed to find for htaccess, 301 Redirects & SEO is this. Based on this, we will do a few things.
As I have discussed before (Get Free Pagerank for your Joomla Website), you should always redirect non-www to www so you can concentrate your page rank. This needs this in your htaccess file:
rewritecond %{http_host} ^compassdesigns.net [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.compassdesigns.net/ [r=301,nc]
Next, if you have been watching, I was making the site on makeajoomlablog.com. We need to redirect any old links:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.makeajoomlablog.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.compassdesigns.net/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^makeajoomlablog.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.compassdesigns.net/$1 [R=301,L]
Next, we can redirect a few of the links I know are popular:
Redirect 301 /new-joomla-book http://www.compassdesigns.net/joomla-blog/New-Joomla-Book.html
Redirect 301 /tutorials/joomla-tutorials/joomla-template-tutorial.html http://www.compassdesigns.net/tutorials/17-joomla-tutorials/48-joomla-template-tutorial.html
Now the next bit is tricksy. We have a boatload of URL’s out there for various (say) tutorial links. We don’t want to have to go through one by one, so lets redirect them all to the same page where people can see a list of all the new ones.
RewriteRule ^tutorials/joomla-tutorials(.*)$ http://www.compassdesigns.net/tutorials.html [L,R=301]
Now we are staring to reduce the traffic on that 404 page!