HI -
I have a site (built years ago) which uses .htm extension on most pages.
I'd like to switch to a Wordpress CMS and use the "html on pages" plugin to re-create the whole site, but then, of course, I would end up with html extensions on all my pages and lose all my search engine placement for the original .htm pages, many of which have first page placement in the SERPs.
What is the correct syntax for a mass 301 redirect that tells the bots that all pages which formerly used .htm extensions are now .html?
Thanks in advance for any help!
J.
What web server are you using?
On Apache you might say:
RedirectMatch permanent ^(.*)\.htm$ /$1.html
(Aside: it's not just SEO! By keeping your old links alive and redirecting to the new ones, you keep incoming traffic and avoid annoying users with 404s.)
Related
I am trying to clean up a previously hacked WordPress site, and domain name reputation, the site has new hosting and is now on a different CMS system, but there are hundreds of spam links in Google I need to get rid of, they look like example.com/votes.php?10054nzwzm75042pw205039
Domain name, then votes.php?**** etc.. Numbers letters all sorts.
So how do I redirect ANYTHING that starts with the domain name then /votes.php?***
Any help greatly appreciated
Unless you have multiple domains, you don't need to explicitly check the domain name.
To send a "410 Gone" for anything that contains /votes.php in the URL-path (and any query string), you can do something like the following at the top of your root .htaccess file using mod_rewrite:
RewriteEngine On
# Serve a 410 Gone for any requests to "/votes.php"
RewriteRule ^votes\.php$ - [G]
A 410 is preferable to a "redirect" if you want to get these URLs removed from the search engines as quickly as possible.
To expedite the process of URL removal from Google then use Google's Removal Tool as well.
If you redirect these pages to the homepage then it will likely be seen as a soft-404 by Google and these URLs are likely to remain in the search results for a lot longer.
While updating a website (completely new page tree, IDs have changed), the old links need to redirect to the new links. Domain stays the same.
This is the first thing I write in my .htaccess
RewriteEngine on
Redirect 301 /index.php?id=5 /contact
Redirect 301 /test.html /xy.html
Redirect 301 /index.php?id=6 /imprint
# and many more
test.html successfully links to xy.html (just a test, they don't even exist and correctly show the 404 page)
the index.php?id=x redirects however do not work. They actually still open whatever new page has this ID.
I don't understand why it's not working. Is TYPO3 interfering? I though I would be safe if I write it as the first thing in my .htaccess.
TYPO3 does not interfere as the rules in the .htaccess file are evaluated before.
Another option could be to use the redirect module of TYPO3 for creating the redirects. Those can then be created in the backend and maintained by editors. A small drawback is that performance is not that perfect as in .htaccess but it is much more convenient.
A WordPress site with a shopping cart plugin is being deactivated and the products are moving to a new site. I'm trying to redirect (301) all references to products at the WP site to the new site. I've tried a variety of things including examples I found here with no success.
I started with this in the .htaccess file at the WP site before the WP rules:
RedirectMatch 301 ^product/(.*)$ http://www.newsite.com/products/
I also tried it as a rewrite:
RewriteRule ^product/(.*) http://www.newsite.com/products/$1 [R=301,L]
I don't care which product is being referenced. I just want to send all such references to the main products page at the new site.
I'm pretty lightweight regarding htaccess, having mostly used it for very simple things. And my regular expressions might be off as well. I'm out of my depth for this one. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Ignoring my stupidity for not getting the .htaccess file uploaded to the right place, eventually this rule worked:
RedirectMatch 301 product/.* http://www.newsite.com/products/
I have a relatively new site that has just started to pick up a bit of traction in the SERP's. My problem is that I have published it and had it indexed with PHP URL extensions, as follows:
www.example.com/page.php
www.example.com/product.php
And so on. Obviously it is a fairly easy matter of editing the .htacess file to remove these extensions. So I will end up with:
www.example.com/page
www.example.com/product
No problems there.
Because the site is still quite small, I can easily change all the links manually to drop the .php extension, and then update the sitemap. So Google, and all users, should have no way of reaching the .php pages, although of course they still exist if you were to manually type them in.
But, because Google has a 'record' of these pages existing (even though there are no direct links to reach them now), do I need to implement 301 redirects from the .php pages to the new non-php pages? I.e. will Google try to crawl those pages that are no longer in the sitemap, but once existed? In other words, since you can still reach www.example.com/page.php , even though will be no link on the site or in the sitemaps that will take you there, would I get penalised for having duplicate content - are 301 redirects basically required when doing this kind of thing, even if there are no links to the content anymore?
Thanks very much.
It is better to have 301 redirect for some time(month or two) even though you can change all your links to nonphp urls. This way any residual URLs(will always be there) that are hanging out there will be taken care and google will index nonphp urls from your 301 redirect. Once you are sure from Logs(depending on your system) that there are no more OLD urls coming in, you can remove the 301 redirects. This is little easier way of moving all your old URLs instead of abruptly throwing 404s. 301 helps to transfer SEO values of old URLs to new ones.
Another item to look out for is using rel="canonical" if you want your .php and nonphp pages to coexist. This signals that they are not duplicates.
I have site that has many links to its pages. And I will completely renew site, update CMS, content and page structure. Domain remains the same.
What will get users in browser if they find somewhere on the Internet old link
to old sites page and follow by that link while it's already a new site and
old page where link leads to doesn't exist?
How to make a redirect or something from these old links if old
pages not open to root of domain?
What's about Google in that case how do not lost PR and
redirect that PR weight of old pages to main domain?
I am kindly appreciate any relative discussion on this topic because it's really interesting from all sides.
What will get users in browser if they find somewhere on the Internet old link to old sites page and follow by that link while it's already a new site and old page where link leads to doesn't exist?
They will get a 404 Not Found.
How to make a redirect or something from these old links if old pages not open to root of domain?
You'll need to create a 301 redirect from every old page to the equivalent new page. You can do it using mod_alias:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/old_page/(.*)$ /new_page/$1
or mod_rewrite:
RewriteRule ^old_page/(.*)$ /new_page/$1 [L,R=301]
You'll obviously need to tailor the matching expressions and targets to your specific needs. If you have a lot of individual URL's that need redirecting, you may want to look into creating a RewriteMap.
What's about Google in that case how do not lost PR and redirect that PR weight of old pages to main domain?
As long as you use 301 redirects (a permanent redirect, as opposed to 302, a temporary redirect) Google's page ranking will transfer to the new URL.
What's better to use mod_alias or mod_rewrite in this situation and why?
Either is fine, but mod_rewrite gives you a lot more options and allows for rewrite maps. But if you are doing something simple, mod_alias is fine.
Again the same with 301 and 302 what's better to use here?
You want 301 here. It means "the resource that you requested has permanently moved to HERE" as opposed to a 302 which means "the resource that you requested isn't here right now, but in the mean time, you can find it HERE". Also, Google won't transfer any page ranking to the new page if you only do a 302 redirect, since it's meant only for temporary redirects. Not when a page has permanently moved to a new URL.
And the last I just looked on the old pages they all like domain.tld/index.php?id=77 does this rule correct RewriteRule ^index.php?id=(*)$ / [L,R=301] in that case for any id number to root?
This rule will not work. You cannot match against the query string (the ?id= part) in a RewriteRule, only against the %{QUERY_STRING} var in aRewriteCond. Also(*)` is probably not what you want.
This will 301 redirect any request for /index.php?id=N where N is any number, to the document root.
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=([0-9]+)
RewriteRule ^index.php$ / [L,R=301]