Multiple 301 Redirects on the same domain name

[AmyCrompton]

Hi,

I'd appreciate some advice ont he below.

I have a website, say www.site.co.uk that has just been redesigned using a new CMS. Previously it had URLs in the format /article.php?id=123, the new site has more friendly urls in the format /articles/article-slug.

I have been able to import the old articles into my CMS using the same article IDs and I have created a unique slug for each post. So now in my database, I have the article id (from the querystring) and a slug.

However, I have hundreds of old URLs indexed by Google in the format /article.php?id=123 and need to redirect these.

My plan was to do the following. 301 Redirect /article.php?id=123 to an intermediate page, in this case /redirect/123. On this intermediate page I would do a database lookup for the article slug, based on the ID from the querystring, create a new URL and perform a second 301 redirect to my new URL E.g. /articles/article-slug-from-database.

Whilst this works and keeps the site usable for visitors the two 301 redirects do worry me, as I don;t want Google indexing lots of /redirect/[article id] urls.

The other solution is to generate hundreds of htaccess redirect rules that map old url to the new url. The first solution is much cleaner, but the two 301's worry me. Will Google work this out on it's own, is there a better way?

Any advice is much appreciated.

Cheers

Rob

[wissamdandan]

Hi Rob,

I do not recommend the second option (using htaccess)   it's a worse abuse of Apache than described above as it would have to do that for every file request (gif|html|js|css|etc)

So my solution for you is to httpd.conf and RewriteMap either by using prg: map or txt: map.

my recommendation will of course be prg: map where you can query your database

For your help http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/rewrite/rewritemap.html

Cheers!

[AmyCrompton]

Great call, I hadn't thought of that. Will go that a go definitly. Cheers