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
-
Where to put 301 redirects in my Wordpress htaccess file?
I have about 25 301 redirects in my Wordpress htaccess file, that look like this: <code>Redirect301/store/index.html https://www.notesinspanish.com/store-home/</code> At the moment they are at the bottom of my htaccess file, below the usual Wordpress rewrite rules: <code># BEGIN WordPress <ifmodulemod_rewrite.c>RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] # END WordPress</ifmodulemod_rewrite.c></code> So they are below all that. Above my WP rewrite rules I have a number of other rules from plugins (caching, ssl). Are my 301's OK where they are at the very bottom of that file? They are working, and redircting pages correctly. Should they be somewhere else? Many thanks for any help. Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | Benspain0 -
301 Redirects Relating to Your XML Sitemap
Lets say you've got a website and it had quite a few pages that for lack of a better term were like an infomercial, 6-8 pages of slightly different topics all essentially saying the same thing. You could all but call it spam. www.site.com/page-1 www.site.com/page-2 www.site.com/page-3 www.site.com/page-4 www.site.com/page-5 www.site.com/page-6 Now you decided to consolidate all of that information into one well written page, and while the previous pages may have been a bit spammy they did indeed have SOME juice to pass through. Your new page is: www.site.com/not-spammy-page You then 301 redirect the previous 'spammy' pages to the new page. Now the question, do I immediately re-submit an updated xml sitemap to Google, which would NOT contain all of the old URL's, thus making me assume Google would miss the 301 redirect/seo juice. Or do I wait a week or two, allow Google to re-crawl the site and see the existing 301's and once they've taken notice of the changes submit an updated sitemap? Probably a stupid question I understand, but I want to ensure I'm following the best practices given the situation, thanks guys and girls!
Technical SEO | | Emory_Peterson0 -
Advice on whether we 301 redirect a page or update existing page?
Hi guys, any advice would be really appreciated. We have an existing page that ranks well for 'red widgets'. The page isn't monetised right now, but we're bringing in a new product onto our site that we optimised for 'blue widgets'. Unfortunately, not enough research was done for this page and we've now realised that consumers actually search for 'red widgets' when looking for the product we're creating as 'blue widgets'. The problem with this is that the 'red widgets' page is in a completely different category of our site than what it needs to be (it needs to be with 'blue widgets'). So, my question is; Should we do a 301 redirect from our 'red-widgets' page to our 'blue-widgets' page which we want to update and optimise the content on there for 'red-widgets'. Or, should we update the existing red-widgets page to have the right products and content on there, even thought it is in the wrong place of our site and users could get confused as to why they are there. If we do a 301 redirect to our new page, will we lose our rankings and have to start again, or is there a better way around this? Thanks! Dave
Technical SEO | | davo230 -
Updating inbound links vs. 301 redirecting the page they link to
Hi everyone, I'm preparing myself for a website redesign and finding conflicting information about inbound links and 301 redirects. If I have a URL (we'll say website.com/website) that is linked to by outside sources, should I get those outside sources to update their links when I change the URL to website.com/webpage? Or is it just as effective from a link juice perspective to simply 301 redirect the old page to the new page? Are there any other implications to this choice that I may want to consider? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Liggins0 -
I have an eCommerce store with a lot of 301 redirects. Would that hurt my rankings?
I use BigCommerce, and they have a system where all the URLs are dynamically generated from the name of each product. So if I named a product "widget x y z" the url would be /widget-x-y-z/, and if I changed that to "blue widget x y z", it would change to /blue-widget-x-y-z/ and automatically redirect the old one to the new one. As a result, in 6 months, because of a lot of tweaking and experimenting, I've ended up with a hefty list of 400 redirects. Some of them are very old, and some are recent. So my question is in two parts: a) does having all of these redirects hurt my rankings? b) if so, would deleting them help?
Technical SEO | | shabbirun0 -
How to verify a page-by-page level 301 redirect was done correctly?
Hello, I told some tech guys to do a page-by-page relevant 301 redirect (as talked about in Matt Cutts video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA) when a company wanted to move to a new domain when their site was getting redesigned. I found out they did a 302 redirect on accident and had to fix that, so now I don't trust they did the page-by-page relevant redirect. I have a feeling they just redirected all of the pages on the old domain to the homepage of the new domain. How could I confirm this suspicion? I run the old domain through screaming frog and it only shows 1 URL - the homepage. Does that mean they took all of the pages on the old domain offline? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | EvolveCreative0 -
Will bad things happen if I cancel 301 site redirect?
Hi, please someone help! We have two identical websites, say A & B. Because of the not so good SEO establishment, site B was built and site A was 301 redirected to site B weeks ago. For some reasons, we have to reuse site A, which means we have to cancel the 301 redirection. (Sound a little crazy) So the question are: 1. Can we conduct the action? 2. If we cant, what's the reason? 3. If we can, what would be the best practice? Thanks for help in advance! Plus: we also CARE what would happen to site B if the 301 is cancelled? Will it grow healthy like a new site?
Technical SEO | | Squall3150 -
Wordpress 301 redirects
I use wordpress as CMS on a few sites and I noticed that word press automattically places 301s if I change a url etc. I believe it does it by having the following in the .htaccess file: BEGIN WordPress<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Should I use this? I feel like it limits my control over the 301s.
Technical SEO | | mmaes0