Redirects for new site new urls?

[scott315]

If redoing a site and updating some of the url's for SEO should you do permanent redirects for the old sites url's ?

Using WordPress. I saw that the Yoast Pro plugin allows you to do this inside WordPress , is this the best way?

Suggestions.? I know there are old articles written out on the web pointing back to the what will be soon old url's so just wondering what's the best way to go about this.

Thanks Scott

[webtheoria.com]

If you have new pages which have the same or similar content as the old pages, those old pages should be redirected to the new ones. If you are to use a ready made plugin or go for the traditional way thats up to you.

[frankgrand]

When updating URLs on a site or transferring your site to a new domain name where you want older,existing content to still work, you should configure a permanent (301) redirect for each of the pages or sections that will contain a new url.

You'll want to use a temporary or 302 redirect if the page will only redirect for a short period of time.

I'm not familiar with the Yoast Pro plugin, but it seems like this would work.  Just make sure that they utilize the proper redirect method (301 vs 302) when configuring the plugin.

Another option would be to configure the .htaccess file in the root web directory, but this isn't for the faint of heart if you're not familiar with configuring a web server!

[scott315]

Ok Thanks, yea i am just building it on a dot.info and then going to update the files on his .com and since some of the url's are not seo friendly and the nav structure is changing will need to do this.

Yes htaccess can be a pain sometimes. Thanks for your input. The Moz crawl says he has 36 temporary redirects right now. maybe they did the same thing I am doing for a prior site to what I am doing. Maybe I need to see which url's they are redirecting somehow and include those for permanent redirects also?

[ThompsonPaul]

Scott, you're really going to want to do this in htaccess. Especially if there are existing redirects from a previous version of the site. You'll need to replace those old redirects with new ones that are both permanent, and that point directly to the new relevant pages. (In order to insure that you're not creating unnecessary multiple-hop redirects).

The other reason is that redirects in htaccess are faster and use fewer server resources than trying to do it within WordPress. Not a big deal if you only have a few redirects, but if you're handling the large number involved in dealing with a new site architecture, htaccess is the way to go.

Paul

[scott315]

Ok, where kind I find the existing? Moz Reports now that he has like 39 Tempory redirects. is there a way to see whats pointing to what?

I don't have access via ftp to his current site and hosting provider yet. Just building the site on a .info them going to transfer all the files over to the .com when ready.