301 Redirect Issue
-
I'm having an issue with 301 redirects:
Let's see if I can verbalize my thoughts on this one...
So we just recently moved our site to Wordpress. One of our new 301 commands is redirecting oursite.com/news to oursite.com/blog . However there are other links from our previous site that look like oursite.com/news/XYZ and the issue is that, because wordpress structures its links differently, that URL is not equivalent to oursite.com/blog/XYZ. Instead, it might look something more like oursite.com/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ or something. Does that make sense?
The issue is that when I find an old link of ours on google that looks something like "oursite.com/news/XYZ" or "oursite.com/news/ABC" it is automatically replacing "news" with "blog". When I try to go in manually and redirect anything that says "/news/XYZ" to "/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ" it still doesn't work. It still just replaces "news" with "blog."
Wow I realize that might not make sense to anyone but if it does - please advise!!
Thanks!!!!
-
I did try that. Not sure why it isn't working but I think it has something to do with Tom's answer below. Heh. Thanks though Daniel!!
-
Wow thanks so much. This might be way over my head (I know very little about web development) but I'm going to talk to our devs about it. Thanks again!!
-
Ah you have a parameter in the old URL. That ? is the real trick here. because you redirected /news to /blog it will redirect /news?anythingyouputhere to /blog?anythingyouputhere if that makes sense.
Did you try to redirect /blog?tag=business-2 to /blog/category/business yet?
-
Hi!
The problem you have is that you are using two different Apache extensions and I don't believe you can control the order the go in. You are using mod_alias and mod_rewrite.
It sounds like you have a line like:
Redirect permanent /news/dinosaur/ninja http://www.oursite.com/blog/ninja
This is the mod_alias rule, and it is firing before your mod_rewrite rules (and then it no longer fits their criteria, so they don't fire).
So, what you need to do is change your mod_alias rules into mod_rewrite rules, so then you can control the order (they execute top to bottom, so you just put your 'specific' redirects above your general ones). You rule should look something like this (I've not confirmed!):
RewriteRule ^/news/dinosaur/ninja/$ /blog/ninja/ [L,R=301]
I hope all that make sense. Let me know how you get on!
-
Hey Daniel. Thanks for your response - the only problem is that we already have /%postname% selected. It is working for mostly every blog entry except this one that I'm running into problems with. I'll show you the exact URL that's giving us the problem.
On google, it shows the URL as:
oursite.com/news?tag=business-2
Then it seems to be redirecting it to:
oursite.com/blog?tag=business-2
However, that site does not exist. It should be
http://oursite.com/category/business
I tried to literally 301 redirect both oursite.com/news?tag=business-2 and http://oursite.com/category/business to http://oursite.com/category/business but neither worked.
Thoughts?
-
It sounds like more of a permalink issue in wordpress than a redirect issue. Under settings on the left sidebar in your wordpress dashboard is a link called permalinks. Go there and let us know what it says there. You probably want a custom structure that says /%postname%/ so that your blog will make permalinks like site.com /blog/postname instead of site.com /blog/category/postname or whatever else might be going on there.
Get the simple 301 redirect plugin and make sure you do redirect every old URL to its new counterpart, but make sure your new ones look the way you want first.
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
-
301 Redirects Showing As 307 Redirects
Hi, Our clients are adamant that they have set up 301 permanent redirects on their websites, but when we check using Screaming Frog and various online HTTP status code checkers they are showing as 307 temporary redirects. Examples;
Technical SEO | | Webpresence
http://www.lifestylelifts.co.uk/home-lifts/
http://www.terrylifts.co.uk/ Again, the client says they are seeing 301 redirects. Why are we seeing 307's? Who is right? Very puzzling, any theories would be very much appreciated 🙂 Thanks in advance. Lee.0 -
301 redirect relative or absolute path?
Hello everyone, Recently we've changed the URL structure on our website, and of course we had to 301 redirect the old urls to the coresponding new ones. The way the technical guys did this is: "http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "/new-url.html"
Technical SEO | | Silviu
meaning as a relative redirect path, not an absolute one like this:
"http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "http://www.domain.com/new-url.html" This happened for few thousands urls, and the fact is the organic traffic dropped for those pages after this change. (no other changes were made on these pages and the new urls are as seo friendly as possible, A grade on On-Page Grader). The question is: does the relative redirect negatively affects seo, or it counts the same as an absolute path redirect? Thanks,
S.0 -
To avoid errors in our Moz crawl, we removed subdomains from our host. (First we tried 301 redirects, also listed as errors.) Now we have backlinks all over the web that are broken. How bad is this, from a pagerank standpoint?
Our MOZ crawl kept telling us we had duplicate page content even though our subdomains were redirected to our main site. (Pages from Wineracks.vigilantinc.com were 301 redirected to vigilantinc.com/wineracks.) Now, to solve that problem, we have removed the wineracks.vigilantinc.com subdomain. The error report is better, but now we have broken backlinks - thousands of them. Is this hurting us worse than the duplicate content problem?
Technical SEO | | KristyFord0 -
What would happen if 301 redirects were not in place
Good Morning from 14 degrees C sunny Wetherby UK 🙂 My question is please.... "When a new site is given a total makover ie old urls are re written to radically different ones I know if you dont set up 301 redirects the infamous 404 error page will rear its head. But i wonder if 301 redirects were not configured how long on average does it take google to index the new site and serp links finally point to the new site". Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Is there ever a time when 301 redirects aren't possible?
I have been told that 301 redirects are always possible. I've been told that it's a very time consuming process so developers at times will say that it's not possible. Is there ever a time when it is not impossible? Perhaps using a specific server? I know it's do-able in Apache which is the server that is in question. Would it be impossible if someone were using a templated type set of websites & if they made changes on one website it would make changes across all websites? *Edit "due to a server configuration 301 redirects aren't possible" Thanks so much for any help or answers you can provide.
Technical SEO | | DCochrane0 -
301 redirect
What is a proper way to redirect any url containing a give word (anywhere in the url) to another sepcified url? Is it like this? RedirectMatch 301 ^thisword$ http://domain.com/newlocation
Technical SEO | | sesertin1 -
Removing 301 Redirects
Is it safe to remove old 301 Redirects from an SEO standpoint and can 301s dramatically affect seo? Prior to switching our old domain over to our new domain, we had (and currently still do) tons of 301 redirects, because of optimizing our file names and structure. Then our old domain was redirected to our new domain in the same redirect file. So that being said, now that our new domain has been up and running for about 3 months, would it be safe for me to get rid of the old 301 redirects and redirect anything that was on our old domain to our new domains home page? This would clean up our redirects tremendously and I hope would help with SEO.
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
Is my 301 redirect working?
Very simple question here . I've redirected a bunch of older pages with decent ranking to some newer pages on my site, using the Thesis theme's built-in redirect function. However, in the SERPS, the older pages (and, importantly, older titles) still show up. When clicked on, they redirect to the new page, but it's still irritating because the older titles make the site look out of date. Is this Working As Intended, or have I or my theme done something wrong? And if it's the latter, what's the best way to achieve a redirect, preferably with a Wordpress plugin?
Technical SEO | | Cairmen0