Keeping our old links

[pano]

Hello Forum

I just worked on redoing an eCommerce website and part of the revisions were to change the site's URL structure. What I'm curious about is how to maintain the external links we had prior to redoing the website so that these external links continue to point to their respective product pages on the new website.

From what I understand, you need remap the old links to the new links in your CMS and set up 301 redirects. What's the easiest way to find the all the old link URLs and remap them? Or is there a different, easier way?

[AlanMosley]

Go to webmaster tools either Bing or Google, Bing seems to have a more complete list. then do a 301 to the relevant pages.

It may be a bit of bother, but it is easier then getting new links

[StalkerB]

You've made the changes already, without making a note of what you've changed from > to?

Well, a) Doh! b) Alan's suggestion of looking for 404 errors in webmaster tools is a decent place to start. Add redirects for anything that's throwing up an error.

I would imagine it'll be a heavily manual process if you've already changed them, though I'm not sure what your CMS is capable of or if your new URLs were sufficiently thought through to allow you to create a rewrite rule

e.g. if the changes were something like
from http://example.com/?id=123&name=product&cat=stuff
to http://example.com/stuff/name/123
then you could add just one rule for the redirects