How to make http status code 301 redirection and 404 Errorhandling work

Question

I have a Wordpress-installation on a server with two domains pointing to it. The plan is to set up a SEO-friendly redirect including 301-redirection and 404 error-handling. I am using 3 files: Apache virtua-host, .htaccess and php-skript (error page for http status code404

Vhost (Apache)

<VirtualHost xx.xxx.xxx.xx:80>
ServerName www.mydomain.com
ServerAlias mydomain.com
DocumentRoot /path/to/mydomain-on-filesystem

     <Directory /path/to/mydomain-on-filesystem>
      Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride All
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
     </Directory>

</VirtualHost>

.htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.mydomain-to-be-redirected\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain-with-content.com/$1 [R=301,L]

ErrorDocument 404 /404.php 

.htaccess and 404.php are located /path/to/mydomain-on-filesystem.

I have trouble making the RewriteRule (301 redirect) and ErrorDocument (404 error handling) work together. As soon as the RewriteRule is in place I get "301 move permanently" when I enter any URL. It completely ignores http status code 404. Unfortunately that causes Google (as far as I heard) and other search engines to decrease the Page Ranking (eg duplicate content).

What am I missing here? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Looking forward to read from you guys :-)

Thanks a lot!

SD

Answer 1

The rewrite rules:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.mydomain-to-be-redirected\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain-with-content.com/$1 [R=301,L]

redirects everything from www.mydomain-to-be-redirected.com to www.mydomain-with-content.com. Anything below that will not get used.

In this case, www.mydomain-with-content.com will return the 404 if the page is not there, which seems like what you would want to happen.