redirect all pages to the homepage

[Josh]

Anyone know how to redirect all pages to the home page? Its for a domain we picked up and there are hundreds of internal pages so doing them 1 by 1 would be a pain. Thanks

[Unknown Webmaster]

Apparently this is a pretty bad idea

I don't know if this is the correct way to do it, or if it would even work...
But I would point to 404 (page not found) to the front page.

Like this in .htaccess

ErrorDocument 404 /index.html

[Michael Martinez]

I would not set the error document to be the home page. The search engines create problems for you when you do that.

You should be able to use a wildcard for the 301-redirect but here's the problem: you'll never have anything but a 1-page domain.

[themike537]

How many pages are you talking about? I bought a domain that had a similar problem, and deleted all the pages and used Webmaster Tools to remove them from the index manually. It was like 100+ pages and took a while but it worked out in the long run.

[Josh]

Thanks for the info guys. This domain has 500+ pages and many of these internal pages have inbound links so I was hoping to redirect all of that link juice to the homepage. This is more of a science experiment than anything else so I'm not really worried about it too much. I will try the suggestions mentioned. Thanks

[Michael Martinez]

If you just want to redirect the link juice, include a link on every page back to your home page. You're way overthinking the process.

[Josh]

If you just want to redirect the link juice, include a link on every page back to your home page. You're way overthinking the process.

If I had picked up a website that would be true but I only acquired the domain so I wanted to redirect all of the currently indexed internal pages to the homepage since thats what I am starting off with. I found the solution though, thanks for the help everyone.

[Michael Martinez]

Well, I'm glad you found a solution.