A Client Changed the Link Structure for Their Site... Not Just Once, but Twice

[digisavvy]

I have a client who's experiencing a number of crawl errors, which I've gotten down fo 9,000 from 18,000. One of the challenges they experience is that they've modified their URL structure a couple times.

First it was: site.com/year/month/day/post-name
Then it was: site.com/category/post-name
Now it's: site.com/post-name

I'm not sure of the time elapsed between these changes, but enough time has passed that the URLs for the previous two URL structures have been indexed and spit out 404s now.

What's the best/clean way to address this issue?I'm not going to create 9k redirect rules obviously, but there's got to be a way to address this issue and resolve it moving forward.

[Thos003]

Have you tried creating a redirect rule for each of the folders? From you example above the "post-name" has remained consistent. Therefore if you create a redirect from each folder then you should see a proper resolution with just appending the "post-name"

[AdoptionHelp]

You could do this with one or two clever regex commands, the composition of which I can't think of cos its too close to quitting time on Friday. But yeah you don't need 9000 rules.

[GYMSN]

Thomas did what we did and it worked fine.  We lost a ton of Yahoo rankings for significant keywords though.  I now personally never change /url/keywords unless I don't care about the Yahoo traffic (or there is none).  Google has no problem with it.

[wojkwasi]

Ryan is absolutely spot on.. you can create some redirection rules in the .htaccess (assuming the site's on apache)

something along the lines of..

RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(.*)$ /$4 [R=301,NC,L]

RewriteRule ^category/(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,NC,L]

(of course if totally depends on your site structure & I'd test these on a staging server if possible)

[digisavvy]

Wow guys! Thanks for the responses. You've given me a couple things to think about.

The suggestions from Thomas and GYMSN might be the way I choose to plod ahead. Though, the rewrite rule seems like an interesting play. I have no idea what either of those lines mean. Heh. Is there a reference you could recommend, Woj, that might shed more light on rewrite rules?

A couple technical pieces to throw out there:

1. It's a WordPress site, so they don't have "folders," per se.

2. They run on linux, with an apache web server

[wojkwasi]

Sure, here's the mod_rewrite guide straight from the horse's mouth
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html

Here's a nice beginner's guide:
http://www.addedbytes.com/for-beginners/url-rewriting-for-beginners/

...with a little cheatsheet for some of the common commands:
http://www.cheatography.com/davechild/cheat-sheets/mod-rewrite/

[KeriMorgret]

Look for the "Redirection" plugin for Wordpress, that can help you make redirects easily. It's also an easy way to let you see what's a 404 on your site, and make redirects from the page listing the 404s.

[wojkwasi]

That looks like a very useful plugin Keri