Which way round to 301 redirect?

[tidybooks]

Hi

We have just added a new layered navigation menu to our website.

so for example we had

Before : www.tidy-books.co.uk/chidlrens-bookcases  (this has the seo juice)

And

Now:  http://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-book-storage/childrens-bookcases

Might be a stupid question but do I redirect the 'now' url to the 'before' url or the the other way round

I look forward to hearing your thoughts

Thanks

[ProductPearson]

Are you based on Wordpress? If so, there are many redirection plugins available where you can simply set wildcards for redirects. One popular one that we use is the following:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

Also, that new title is somewhat keyword stuffy looking to me and as it shows the same keywords, you wouldn't really see any additional benefit, having it short and to the point would give a better user experience and still allow for keywords to appear in the URL.

[tidybooks]

Hi Thanks for you answer

We use magento so I will be using the URL rewrite function

[ProductPearson]

Magento can sometimes be tricky. If you don't have a lot of pages, you can also create the redirects in htaccess.

[MoosaHemani]

The Now URLs are the one you probably want ideally so it should be before to now!!

[CandymanKen]

Hi-

Look into the built-in Magento redirects (catalog -->URL Rewrite Management). They tend to work much faster than putting all those redirects into an htaccess file (I learned that from experience)

Ken

[jeff-rackaid.com]

From a system operations standpoint, here's a couple of tips about rewrite rules, especially if you are doing a mass rewrite.

When to avoid htaccess?

If you have 100's of rewrites do not use htaccess to rewrite each one individually.  The problem is that every HTTP request passing through has to be matched against the rules.  We recently had a customer's developers put in ~8000 rewrite rules - one per page. The result - the server queue filled up as every HTTP request was evaluated against 8000+ conditions.

If you have more than few 100 rewrites, consider either looking for a way to use regular expressions to dynamically rewrite them or use tools built into your CMS software.

Check your headers.

When you have completed your 301 efforts, you can use curl at the command line:

curl -I http://www.domain.com/

or use a tool like Redbot.org to check your headers to assure the 301 is correctly configured.

Trailing Slashes

I am not sure how or if trailing slashes impact SEO nowadays,  but I noticed in your example URLs, they did not include a trailing slash.  I have seen some CMS systems rewrite

http://www.domain.com/page -> http://www.domain.com/page/

This can cause a double 301.  This is easy to miss.   I've found this to be more common when changing CMS systems but something to check.

You may want to check out: http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization and the trailing slash comments there.  Since you are dealing with a rewrite, you may want to fix that now.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi there, you've received some good responses. Did any of them answer your question? We'd love an update, thanks!  (Christy)