Change name of directory
-
How can I best change the name of a directory on my website (example: http://www.website.com/nameofdirectory/)?
The directory has lots of content included in it which has links from all over my website. I guess I have to adjust those links? How do I easily collect all of the links?
Which is the code I should use in my htacces?
Thank you!
With kind regards,
Dieter -
A 301 is the code returned by your web server, along with the address of the new page. htaccess (mod_rewrite) is the most powerful tool to do this because it uses regular expressions to filter (which, consequently, also makes it more difficult to use).
You don't have to use htaccess, however. Virtually all server-side programming languages (like PHP, .NET, Ruby on Rails, etc) support telling Apache what headers to return. Here's a PHP example
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location:http://www.newsite.com");
exit(); -
You can use a text editor like Notepad++ for it.
-
Is there a software I should use for "Search & Replace"?
-
Download the website and do a search and replace for nameofdirectory to new****nameofdirectory. That should take care of it. Along with that put a 301 in place for any external links going to nameofdirectory. You should be good.
-
I just dont see how I can add a 301 redirect to a page. I thought I could only add it in .htaccess?
How about the pages on my website that link to the old directory?
-
The website itself is static but the directory is a CMS. What would be the best option then?
-
The same principle applies to all rewrites. You can rewrite one page, an entire directory or even your whole site. htaccess is one of Apache's best features and that's why every web server out there offers some version of it.
If I'm still not answering your question then please supply some more details and I can go more in depth.
-
Is your website static or uses some sort of a CMS ? It might be possible to do a search and replace for nameofdirectory or newnameofdirectory and that should work. I would also recommend doing a directory level 301 redirect via .htaccess that will redirect http://www.website.com/nameofdirectory/* to http://www.website.com/new****nameofdirectory/*
//301 Redirect Entire Directory RedirectMatch 301 /nameofdirectory(.*) /newnameofdirectory/$1
-
@ Highland: It is not a page, it is a directory.
-
You need to add a 301 redirect to your new page. This will send a command to your browser (and any bots) to go to the new page. This page describes how to modify your htaccess file.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Changed domains, saw significant drop in domain authority
Hello, A little over a month ago we switched our domain from A to B. The original was .com and the new one is at a .tech for good measure. We have meticulously done 301 redirects page by page but there has been a massive drop in traffic and I checked here to see that we've gone from a 30 domain authority to a 9. The company is a few months over 1 year old, but we're really looking at traffic accumulated in just about 8 months for the old domain. Is there any way to recover some of the old juice in this one other than the re-directs? Our number of backlinks have also severely dropped despite re-directs.
Technical SEO | | SteveSaf0 -
Old site name showing in SERPs
Hi all, We've recently re-launched one of our sites with a substantial redesign, refreshed content, meta data, descriptions and functionality. We noticed in SERPs that some of the page titles are showing the old name for the site, which hasn't been used for a few years and the site's been through a few updates and a URL change since then. All the meta titles showing up as they should in crawls through Search Console and Moz and it's my understanding that if Google were pulling a cached version of a title it would have gone for a more recently cached one? Any thoughts on why Google's turned back the clock on our site's name would be greatly appreciated! -Jamie
Technical SEO | | JamieCMF0 -
Best way to handle 301 redirects on a business directory
We work with quite a few sites that promote retail traders and feature a traders' directory with pages for each of the shops (around 500 listings in most cases). As retail strips, shops come and go all the time, so I get a lot of pages that are removed as the business is no longer present. Currently I've been doing 301 redirects to the home page of the directory if you try to access a deleted trader page, but this means a ever growing htaccess file with thousands of 301 redirects. Are we handling this the best way or is there a better way to tackle this situation?
Technical SEO | | Assemblo0 -
Changing URL of posts
HI, I need to change the urls and permalink structure of my blogposts. How I have to deal all this with google? Do I have to re-submit the pages to google with fetch as google? Will google display duplicate content of the same article ( having changed the url) or will it automatically replace the old url with the new ones? Tx for your support guys!
Technical SEO | | tourtravel0 -
Keyword in Domain Name
Hello!My website is www.enchantingquotes.com. I also own the domain www.enchantingwallquotes.com,which forwards to my site. About 90% of my business comes from the keyword "wall quotes". Should I consider changing switching to the enchantingwallquotes.com domain and redirecting? And if I do, do I need to recreate the entire website or is there an easier way that I am overlooking? Thank you for any advise/insight!
Technical SEO | | eqgirl0 -
How to tell google about the changes
Hello All this is my first question here. we have recently changed our website design and backend. so the problem now is in google it is showing the old url's and when ever a client come from google he is prasented with a 404 error page if this happenes many times. will google penalise our site ? if yes. how to prevent this from happen. waiting for some replies.. thanks
Technical SEO | | idreams1 -
Changing url structure
We are an ecommerce site established in 2005 and currently have some great rankings. We are about to move away from our existing platform, actinic and move on to Magento. This will change all our url's. What are the steps we should be asking our web developers to follow in order to minimize the consequences of moving? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | LadyApollo0 -
Seo impact for template change
Hi, If you change a template (wordpress, joomla cms..) without changing information organization..(urls..) Does this can have an impact on your serp ? Tks a lot ...
Technical SEO | | mozllo0