Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

Where to put 301 redirects in Magento?

Technical SEO

1209

tilenkrivec last edited by

I will be changing the URL structure in a magento store from "base/category/subcategory/product" to "base/product" which means i have to make over 1000 URL 301 redirects so our old links still work.

Should i put the redirects in a .htaccess file so they stay intact no matter what or should i just put them in with all the other rewrites (in Magento 's URL rewrite manager)?

Thanks
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
IPROdigital @tilenkrivec last edited by

Yes I suppose it would check everytime. That said, i have written files with several hundred lines of code and the sites still load really fast even on shared servers which are not the best...
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 1
tilenkrivec @IPROdigital last edited by

Will that in any way slow down the site? Adding thousands of lines of code to the .htaccess file?

Edit: Checked some more, apparently having thousands of redirects in .htaccess file shows things downs, since Apache scans the file each time a new page is opened.

tl/dr: Stick with magento URL rewrites
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
IPROdigital last edited by

I think either is fine as long as it works. Personally I prefer to writ my own .htaccess files as I then understand exactly what I have done - it feels safer for some reason.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 1

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

Forced Redirects/HTTP<>HTTPS 301 Question

Hi All, Sorry for what's about to be a long-ish question, but tl;dr: Has anyone else had experience with a 301 redirect at the server level between HTTP and HTTPS versions of a site in order to maintain accurate social media share counts? This is new to me and I'm wondering how common it is. I'm having issues with this forced redirect between HTTP/HTTPS as outlined below and am struggling to find any information that will help me to troubleshoot this or better understand the situation. If anyone has any recommendations for things to try or sources to read up on, I'd appreciate it. I'm especially concerned about any issues that this may be causing at the SEO level and the known-unknowns. A magazine I work for recently relaunched after switching platforms from Atavist to Newspack (which is run via WordPress). Since then, we've been having some issues with 301s, but they relate to new stories that are native to our new platform/CMS and have had zero URL changes. We've always used HTTPS. Basically, the preview for any post we make linking to the new site, including these new (non-migrated pages) on Facebook previews as a 301 in the title and with no image. This also overrides the social media metadata we set through Yoast Premium. I ran some of the links through the Facebook debugger and it appears that Facebook is reading these links to our site (using https) as redirects to http that then redirect to https. I was told by our tech support person on Newspack's team that this is intentional, so that Facebook will maintain accurate share counts versus separate share counts for http/https, however this forced redirect seems to be failing if we can't post our links with any metadata. (The only way to reliably fix is by adding a query parameter to each URL which, obviously, still gives us inaccurate share counts.) This is the first time I've encountered this intentional redirect thing and I've asked a few times for more information about how it's set up just for my own edification, but all I can get is that it’s something managed at the server level and is designed to prevent separate share counts for HTTP and HTTPS. Has anyone encountered this method before, and can anyone either explain it to me or point me in the direction of a resource where I can learn more about how it's configured as well as the pros and cons? I'm especially concerned about our SEO with this and how this may impact the way search engines read our site. So far, nothing's come up on scans, but I'd like to stay one step ahead of this. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | ogiovetti

0
I have a question about the impact of a root domain redirect on site-wide redirects and slugs.

I have a question about the impact (if any) of site-wide redirects for DNS/hosting change purposes. I am preparing to redirect the domain for a site I manage from https://siteImanage.com to https://www.siteImanage.com. Traffic to the site currently redirects in reverse, from https://www.siteImanage.com to https://siteImanage.com. Based on my research, I understand that making this change should not affect the site’s excellent SEO as long as my canonical tags are updated and a 301 redirect is in place. But I wanted to make sure there wasn’t a potential consequence of this switch I’m not considering. Because this redirect lives at the root of all the site’s slugs and existing redirects, will it technically produce a redirect chain or a redirect loop? If it does, is that problematic? Thanks for your input!
Technical SEO | | mollykathariner_ms

0
Should existing canonical tags be removed where a 301 redirect is the preferred option?

Hi, I'm working on a site that is currently using canonical tags to deal with www and non-www variations. My recommendation is to setup 301 redirects to deal with this issue instead. However, is it ok to leave the existing canonical tags in place alongside the new 301 redirects or should they be removed? My thoughts are that this is not a canonical issue and therefore they should be removed? If 301 redirects are not possible it would be better have them that nothing at all but I don't think we need both, right? Any feedback much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | MVIreland

0
404 Errors for Form Generated Pages - No index, no follow or 301 redirect

Hi there I wonder if someone can help me out and provide the best solution for a problem with form generated pages. I have blocked the search results pages from being indexed by using the 'no index' tag, and I wondered if I should take this approach for the following pages. I have seen a huge increase in 404 errors since the new site structure and forms being filled in. This is because every time a form is filled in, this generates a new page, which only Google Search Console is reporting as a 404. Whilst some 404's can be explained and resolved, I wondered what is best to prevent Google from crawling these pages, like this: mydomain.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/TopCategoriesDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=90&catalogId=1008&homePage=Y Implement 301 redirect using rules, which will mean that all these pages will redirect to the homepage. Whilst in theory this will protect any linked to pages, it does not resolve this issue of why GSC is recording as 404's in the first place. Also could come across to Google as 100,000+ redirected links, which might look spammy. Place No index tag on these pages too, so they will not get picked up, in the same way the search result pages are not being indexed. Block in robots - this will prevent any 'result' pages being crawled, which will improve the crawl time currently being taken up. However, I'm not entirely sure if the block will be possible? I would need to block anything after the domain/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/TopCategoriesDisplay?. Hopefully this is possible? The no index tag will take time to set up, as needs to be scheduled in with development team, but the robots.txt will be an quicker fix as this can be done in GSC. I really appreciate any feedback on this one. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | Ric_McHale

0
301 redirect adding trailing slash to url

I am looking into a .htacess file for a site I look after and have noticed that the urls are all 301 redirecting from a none slash directory to a trailing slashed directory/folders. e.g. www.domain.com/folder gets 301 redirected to www.domain.com/folder/ Will this do much harm and reduce the effect on the page and any links pointing to the site be lessened? Secondly I am not sure what part of my htaccess is causing the redirect. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.co.uk [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.co.uk/$1 [L,R,NE] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php
RewriteRule ^(.)index.php$ /$1 [R=301,L] or could a wordpress ifmodule be causing the problem? Any info would be apreciated.
Technical SEO | | TimHolmes

0
Maintaining Link Value Of Old URLS With 301 Redirects

Large ecommerce site that has been around for a long time (15+ years.) During that time technology has changed a lot and we are running into issues maintaining 301 redirects for very old urls. For example we have a good amount of links to product and category pages. Some of the old links are to products that still exist and will exist for many years to come.(of note little to no traffic comes via these links. Most of them are close to 9 years old so they are buried deep within articles, forums, or websites) However as we make changes to the site and URL structure these old urls are taking up more resources to continue to maintain 301 redirects. I am Leary of no longer supporting them because I do not want it to impact rankings however there is concern on how much development time and technology resources it takes to continue to support as time goes on. Does anyone have experience handling redirects 3 or 4 url structures old? Looking for insight from someone who has crossed this bridge before.
Technical SEO | | RMATVMC

0
Help creating a 301 redirect in my htaccess file

Hi Guys, I'm trying to build a 301 file with the file requirements: It should be visible only for Google and other Search Engine Agents. It will have a few direct redirects. A few URL must be dynamic redirect. For example each page the starts with olddomain.com/category and is not in the list of of direct redirects should be redirect for newdomain.com/category Here is my start point: #301 Starts here Set the agents RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Googlebot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} msnbot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Slurp Make the direct redirect. Redirect 301 /category/sub1 http://www.newdomain.com/category/sub1
Redirect 301 /category/sub2 http://www.newdomain.com/category/sub2 Redirect everything else Redirect 301 /category/* http://www.newdomain.com/category #End of my 301 Will that work how I want? is there anything wrong?
Technical SEO | | Felip3

0
What to do with a 302 redirect after a while

Hi guys, A client of ours has a website with a very bad linkprofile. We adressed this issue and we migrated the website to another domain. We redirected the bad website (cornelisbedding.be) to the new domain (cornelisbedding.com) with a 302 redirect. We didn't want to pass the bad link juice. The problem we are having now is that we can't afford to lose the redirect on cornelisbedding.be. We would lose to much traffic because the old domain still has alot of links that generate good quality traffic. I have read that Google will treat 302 redirects as 301's in the long run. We really want to avoid this.
We were thinking of using a meta refresh with a delay on, but in Google's eyes that would be considered spammy. Are their any other suggestions on how to handle this? Thanks you!
Technical SEO | | Jacobe

0