A solution would be greatly appreciated!!

Some of the scripting I have tried without success are:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} a3rddomainihave.org
RewriteRule ^imgs/([^/\.]+)/?$ /mydomain/imgs/$1 [L]
#
RewriteRule ^a3rddomainihave/imgs/([^/\.]+)/?$ /mydomain/imgs/$1 [L]
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} a3rddomainihave.org
RewriteRule ^imgs/([^/\.]+)/?$ http://www.mydomain.com/imgs/1 [L]
#
RewriteRule ^http://www.a3rddomainihave.org/imgs/([^/\.]+)/?$ http://www.mydomain.com/imgs/1 [L]
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} a3rddomainihave.org
RewriteRule ^imgs/([^/\.]+)/?$ /path/to/mydomain/imgs/$1 [L]

A properly executed 301 redirect will communicate to search engines that a page has moved, and the ranking associated with it should be transferred to the new page. Maybe you executed your 301 redirect improperly? Here’s a quick example of how it should be done:

# Redirect to new contact page
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^contact.html(.*)$ /contact.php [L,R=301]

This is the safest way to redirect pages without losing PageRank. You should also update your sitemap.xml file when your site changes structure and ping the various search services that support it so they will index your site properly (see the free chapter on the book’s companion site at http://buildingfindablewebsites.com/d/chapters/10_BFW.pdf for guidance with this).

“Is this temporary?” - That depends on your perspective. Although you can incur a slight speed hit when you have a lot of redirects (your server has an extra step in order to point users to the right content), it really is not a problem to keep your 301 redirects live for a long time. Redirects are not really something you would take down after a month or a year as some users may still have the old URL bookmarked, and would get a 404 page if you removed the redirect. But when search engine spiders see a redirect they will update the indexes accordingly, and begin to point traffic to your new page. In that sense it is temporary, but I don’t recommend removing your redirects until you are absolutely certain they are no longer of any use.

Changing filenames is not risky if you use redirects to point requests for the old URL to the new one. Plan URLs intelligently when you build a site, and hopefully you won’t find yourself having to make so many changes.

redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

Is this temporary? Is there an SEO best practices method for relocating/renaming a file or set of files? I was trying to avoid the refresh meta tag.

Follow up question - is it too risky to change the name of a file to a more search engine friendly name - say from booksale.htm to book-sale.htm?

Thanks for any feedback!

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} mydomain.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !mydomain/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ mydomain/$1 [L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} anotherdomainihave.net
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !sanotherdomainihave/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ anotherdomainihave/$1 [L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} a3rddomainihave.org
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !a3rddomainihave/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ a3rddomainihave/$1 [L]

Just wanted to ask a question about this method. Would this work with multiple domain name on the same server? For example, let’s say I added

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} mydomain.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !mydomain/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ mydomain/$1 [L]

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} anotherdomainihave.net
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !sanotherdomainihave/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ anotherdomainihave/$1 [L]

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} a3rddomainihave.org
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !a3rddomainihave/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ a3rddomainihave/$1 [L]

to my .htaccess file. Would this work or is it only for two?

Thanks