Redirecting a working dynamic URI to a new static format
-
Hi all
I am having some issues rearding url rewrites and 301 redirects with 1 and 1 hosting and am unsure of the best approach. The website is a custom made shopping cart system with categories and products.
The current urls for categories are : index.php?l=product_list&c=1 The new url format required is : /banner-stands
After a little bit of research I added the following into the htaccess file;
Options +FollowSymlinks
AddType x-mapp-php5 .phpRewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^banner-stands/?$ index.php?l=product_list&c=1 [R=301,NC,L]
Which works but I have a few questions
Question 1: Is this the best approach as there are 55 categories and 179 products to write redirects for
Question 2: Or is it better to firstly add id=banner-stands into the url and then create 301 redirects to the new url and then rewrite the url.
Thanks
-
This is what I would do:
.htaccess
Options +FollowSymLinks -Multiviews -Indexes
RewriteEngine On#This line is for the categories
RewriteRule ^category/(.*)$ index.php?l=product_list&category_name=$1 [L]Note: you will need a new rule for each "type" of page. That was an example for the categories only.
Then you will need to add some PHP code to read the $_GET["category_name"] variable, which should be text (like banner-stands) and get the category id from your database to later load the products. You have several ways to do that, for example: insert an extra column in the DB with the category name "dashed" and search the category id using that new field.
You should then change your internal linking to use those new URLs instead and add a rel=canonical pointing to the new versions of the URLs.
Don't 301 all others until you have the above solved and working. Make sure you make everything safe, as with that structure something like index.php?l=product_list&c=1&sort=asc won't work anymore unless you create extra rules for that, same as with pagination, if you have any.
Hopes this gives you an idea on where to start.
***You are not redirecting dynamic to static urls, you are just making them friendlier
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
-
Need advice on redirects
Hi, I have new web addresses for my subpages. None if them have external links. Should I do redirects to the new pages or just leave the old pages in 404 and let google crawl and rank the new page. I am asking because my current pages don’t have a good ranking and I am thinking starting with a clean url is better. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Redirecting traffic to https
Hey! i was wondering, should i force all traffic to https address? i know that overall a better secured website will rank better since it earns more trust from users which means less bounce rate and the list of benefits is endless..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharonEKG
but should i FORCE ALL traffic to a https? or maybe only force a http to https? or not at all?2 -
Redirect Chains
Hi There, I have had conducted a few migrations recently and have a common issue which is this: HTTP (old site) -> HTTPS (old site) -> (HTTPS) (new site) Which causes a redirect chain. How should you prevent this before migration or fix it after migration? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kayl870 -
Geoip redirection, 301 or 302?
Hello all Let me first try to explain what our company does and what it is trying to achieve. Our company has an online store, sells products for 3 different countries, and two languages for each country. Currently we have one site, which is open to all countries, what we are trying to achieve is make 3 different stores for these 3 different countries, so we can have a better control over the prices in each country. We are going to use Geoip to redirect the user to the local store in his country. The suggested new structure is to add sub-folders as following: www.example.com/ca-en
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajarad
www.example.com/ca-fr
www.example.com/us-en
... If a visitor is located outside these 3 countries, then she'll be redirected to the root directory www.example.com/en We can't offer to expand our SEO team to optimize new pages for the local market, it's not the priority for now, the main objective now is to be able to control the prices for different market. so to eliminate the duplicate issue, we'll use canonical tags. Now knowing our objective from the new URL structure, I have two questions: 1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections? 2- Knowing that Google bots comes from US-IP, does that mean that the other versions of the site won't be crawled (i.e, www.example.com/ca-fr), this is especially important for us as we are using AdWords, and unindexed pages will effect our quality score badly. I'd like to know if you have other account structure in your mind that would be better than this proposed structure. Your help is highly highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.0 -
When is it time to kill 301 redirects
3 months we updated our site design design and as such lots of page urls changed. At the time we 301 redirected about 100 pages. (All pages are on the same domain - 301 redirects like .com/about-us/company to .com/company) Anyhow my question is should I leave these redirects active indefinitely or kill them assuming value has passed through by now? Your Thoughts are welcomed. Thanks, Glen.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdvanceSystems0 -
Big 301 Redirect Help!
Hey guys I need a little help with setting up a big 301. Background: It's a bit of a mess as the old site is a total mess after being online for 10 years plus. It has html and php pages, and a mod rewrite to redirect old html links to the newer php version of those pages. It's now moving to a new site and as the domain name and URL structure has changed we can't use any fancy regex and have to do a page to page redirect. There are 1500 pages to redirect. However, the old site has thousands of linking root domains, and some of these are to the old html pages (which currently redirect to the php pages) and some to the newer php pages. Question: My initial plan was to leave the mod rewrite and only redirect the php pages. That means 1500 individual redirects instead of 3000 if I individually redirect both the php and html pages. I'm not sure what's best to be honest. We don't really want multiple hops in the redirect (html>php>new site), but surely 1500 redirects is better than 3000! Does anyone have any advice on which option may be best, or even a better option? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HarveyP0 -
How to conduct catch 301 redirects & have the separate 301 redirects for the key pages
Hi, We've currently done a site migration mapping and 301 redirecting only the sites key pages. However two GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) is picking a massive amount of 404 areas and there has been some drop in rankings. I want to mitigate the site from further decline, and hence thought about doing a catch 301 - that is 301 redirecting the remaining pages found on the old site back to the home page, with the future aim of going through each URL one by one to redirect them to the page which is most relevant. Two questions, (1) can I do a catch 301 and if so what is the process and requirements that I have to give to the developer? (2) How do you reduce the number of increasing 404 errors from a site, despite doing 301 redirects and updating links on external linking sites. Note: The server is apache and the site is hosted on Wordpress platform. Regards, Vahe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vahe.Arabian0 -
Best way to geo redirect
Hi I have a couple of ecommerce websites which have both a UK and USA store. At the moment I have both the UK and the USA domains sending me traffic from UK and USA search engines which means that a number of users are clicking a Google page for the store not in their location, ie UK people are clicking on a .com listing and ending up on the USA website. What is the best way to automatically redirect people to the correct store for their region? If I use an IP based auto redirect system would Google see some of the pages are doorway pages? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0