You find an old link pointing somewhere you don’t want it to go.
Maybe another company owns the domain. Maybe you lost access to an old domain years ago. Or maybe there’s a link to your website from somewhere else and you’d really like to change what happens when someone clicks it.
Can you just redirect it?
Usually, no.
A redirect happens at the URL someone visits first. So to create one, you need some level of control over the domain that URL belongs to.
The redirect starts at the source
Let’s say you want this:
oldbrand.com/product → newbrand.com/product
When someone visits the old URL, their browser sends a request to oldbrand.com. Something on that side needs to receive the request and respond with the new destination.
That could be a web server, a hosting platform, a redirect service, or another piece of infrastructure.
But whatever handles it needs to be connected to oldbrand.com.
Owning newbrand.com doesn’t give you any control over what happens at oldbrand.com. You control where you want people to end up, but not the place they’re coming from.
It’s a bit like moving house. You can put your name on the new door, but you can’t put a forwarding sign on the old one if it no longer belongs to you.
You don’t need to own the website
This is where the distinction gets useful.
You need control of the source domain, but you don’t necessarily need a website running on it.
Say your company used to have a website at:
oldbrand.com
The website is gone, the hosting has been cancelled, but you still own the domain and can update its DNS.
You can still redirect it.
Instead of keeping the old website online, you can point the domain toward infrastructure that handles the redirects for you. That’s how Redirect Supply works: you connect a domain through DNS, then create the rules that decide where its URLs should go.
So the important question isn’t really “Do I own the website?”
It’s “Can I control the domain?”
What if someone else owns the domain?
Then the redirect needs to happen on their side.
For example, another company might own:
othercompany.com/old-link
and you’d like it to redirect to:
yourwebsite.com/new-page
You can’t create that redirect from yourwebsite.com. The owner of othercompany.com would need to change the old URL, create the redirect, or give you the necessary control over the domain or infrastructure.
If you know who owns the site, asking them to update the link may actually be the simplest solution.
If you don’t control the source at all, there isn’t a redirect setting you can add at the destination to override it.
What about backlinks from other websites?
This one is slightly different.
Say another website links to:
yourwebsite.com/old-page
You don’t control their website, so you can’t change the link itself.
But you do control yourwebsite.com.
That means you can redirect:
yourwebsite.com/old-page → yourwebsite.com/new-page
The backlink can stay exactly where it is. When someone clicks it, the request reaches a domain you control, your redirect handles it, and the visitor continues to the new page.
This is one of the reasons redirects are so useful after migrations and URL changes. You’ll probably never find and update every old link on the internet. You don’t need to.
As long as you still control the URL they point to, you can handle what happens next.
What if you no longer own your old domain?
This is the situation you want to avoid.
You might move from oldbrand.com to newbrand.com, set up all your redirects, and eventually decide there’s no reason to keep paying for the old domain.
But once you give up that domain, you also give up control over its redirects.
If someone else registers it later, you can’t decide where its URLs lead anymore. Old backlinks and bookmarks pointing there are no longer yours to handle.
So if an old domain still has useful URLs pointing to it, keep ownership of it for as long as those redirects matter.
You don’t need to keep the old website. You don’t necessarily need its old hosting. But you do need the domain.
What do you actually need to create a redirect?
Before trying to redirect an old URL, work backwards from the source:
Check which domain the old URL belongs to.
Make sure you control that domain.
Confirm that you can change its DNS or the infrastructure handling its requests.
Decide where the old URL should lead.
Create the redirect.
Test the original URL to make sure it reaches the right destination.
With Redirect Supply, that means adding a domain you control, adding the generated DNS records, waiting for it to become Connected, and then creating your redirect rules.
If you can’t complete the domain-control part, neither Redirect Supply nor any other redirect service can take control of that URL for you.
It comes down to control
You don’t need to own the destination and source in the same way. And you certainly don’t need to keep an entire website running just because you want its old URLs to redirect.
But you do need control over the place where the request starts.
If someone else owns the source domain, they control what happens there.
If you own the domain but no longer have a website on it, that’s fine. You can still point it toward redirect infrastructure and keep those old URLs useful.
So, can you redirect a URL you don’t own?
Not usually.
But if the URL belongs to a domain you still control, even if the website itself is long gone, you have everything you need to make the redirect happen.
