How can I redirect old URLs to new ones?

[personalproducts]

We are trying to optimize our website for search engines and one of the things we have noticed that needs to be changed are the URLs. I know how to modify the URLs but have no idea how I can get the old redirected to the new ones using 301. We have some pages ranking pretty high on Google and we can't loose this traffic.

Our website is hosted on Plesk and it was coded using Cold Fusion. I do have access to the .htaccess file.

Any help would be highly appreciated.

[NakulGoyal]

You can do 301 redirects from the old page to the new page using .htaccess..however I would suggest you test the impact by doing it for 1-2 urls first and see if it does indeed help. The reason I am suggesting this is because when you do 301 redirects or canonical urls which also act like 301s, there's a little bit of link juice loss from the old URL. S if you have lots of websites linking to that page, you may loose a little bit of that link juice. Again, you have to do more of a risk/reward analysis and see what makes sense.

[blu42media]

Hey Flavia-

Check out this article on htaccess magic

http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/list-of-methods-to-redirect-users-to-different-page.html

There is a section on 301 redirects that will get you started.  If you want to share any specific examples I'd be happy to help you further.

-John

[personalproducts]

Thanks.. I got that far, but I tried few different 301 redirects and it didn't work.

One example would be this:

_http://personal-products.co.uk/overnight-toiletry-packs.html_ -> our current url

we have optimized this page to "toiletry travel bags" so i want the url to look something like this:

_http://personal-products.co.uk/toiletry-travel-bags_

I can change the URL manually but I need to create a 301 redirect. Do you have any idea how I can do it? As we use a coldfusion website, the pages don't actually exist, they are all on the database.

i had tried few methods I found on google but no luck =[

[personalproducts]

Thanks for your help!

The example would be the same as the one above, do you know what is the best way to do it??

_http://personal-products.co.uk/overnight-toiletry-packs.html_ -> our current url

we have optimized this page to "toiletry travel bags" so i want the url to look something like this:

_http://personal-products.co.uk/toiletry-travel-bags_

[blu42media]

You could try something like this:

RewriteRule ^overnight-toiletry-packs.html /toiletry-travel-bags [R=301,L]

You need to escape the hyphens and periods... and include the switches for the 301 and specify that it's the Last rule.

Let me know how that goes - certainly share some code if you still get stuck.

-John

[jim_cetin]

Hi

maybe this article can help: http://www.quackit.com/coldfusion/tutorial/coldfusion_redirect.cfm

In ColdFusion, redirects can be done via one of two methods. The method you use will depend on the reason for the redirect.

Temporary Redirects (cflocation)

This is the most commonly used of the two - you will probably find yourself using the cflocation tag often.

A temporary redirect is typically used when you need to redirect the user to another page based on some logical rule in your program. For example, straight after they submit a form, the browser might redirect to another page.

ColdFusion includes the cflocation tag for performing temporary redirects. This actually sends HTTP headers to the user's browser indicating a 302 status code, which means "Moved Temporarily".

 <cflocation url="/new_location.cfm"></cflocation> 

Permanent Redirects

A permanent redirect should be used when a page no longer exists.

Permanent redirects use the 301 HTTP status code, which means, "Moved Permanently". In ColdFusion, a permanent redirect can be achieved using the cfheader tag.

 <cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved Permanently"><cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.quackit.com/coldfusion/tutorial"><cfabort></cfabort></cfheader></cfheader> 

In case you're thinking, "but users can't see the status code anyway", that's only partially true. The 301 status code can be very useful for search engines. They will actually take notice of your 301 status code and index the correct file.

[personalproducts]

I have tried it but still no luck, I might have done something wrong though.

I need to urgently redirect _http://www.personal-products.co.uk/pvc-cosmetic-bag-1.html_ to _http://personal-products.co.uk/resealable-cosmetic-bags---white_ (I will change this URL in the future too but need it working now...)

I have tried it like this:

RewriteRule ^pvc-cosmetic-bag-1.html /resealable-cosmetic-bags---white [R=301,L]

Is there anything wrong?

Thanks!

[personalproducts]

Hi, thanks for your help. The problem with this is that I don't have access to individual pages, the system will load it from the database. I think a .htaccess redirect would be the best solution, the problem is that I don't really know how to do it and how to write a redirect that would work.

Best regards

[personalproducts]

I just created a .html file for one of the URLs that had this extension thought the system doesn't generate htmls and it worked! Now I need to find a solution to the URLs that don't have an extension...

[personalproducts]

As this URL in particular had a .html extension I thought it was easier to just create a html file and redirect it, so this one is working. But I still would like to know if i had done anything wrong because it didn't work. As most of our URLs don't have a .html extension it would be helpful to create the redirects on .htaccess

[blu42media]

Don't forget to escape your hyphens (all of them!) with backslashes:

^pvc-cosmetic-bag-1.html

You will need to escape them before white too:

---white