Joomla 301 redirects

[ClaireH-184886]

hi i am using joomla sef404 and i have 7000 not found pages in my webmaster google tool page. the trouble is i got rid of a lot of pages and also components so now i am left with loads of not found pages.

what i want to try and do is to create 301 redirects so that i do not lose page rank.

can anyone please let me know how to do this step by step please

[JaspalX]

Diane, what I did in a similar situation (though not with anything like as many pages), was to create rules in htaccess for the old to the new url structures using mod rewrite and regular expressions. It's pretty much impossible to say what rules you need without knowing the urls.

That works if your new urls are in some way related to the old ones otherwise you need to do singe redirects for the old urls to the new ones. (Again you can do this all in htaccess, but sh404sef allows you to do redirects too, suggest you ask on their support forums if you don't know how.)

Finally, do you really need to redirect all those old pages? If they didn't have any incoming links, then how much value (i.e. link juice) were they really adding to your site? How much traffic were those pages bringing - if little or none, why not just let Google realise figure out that they're gone and (eventually) drop them from the index?

[ClaireH-184886]

hi thanks for that. i have now dealt with a lot of them through htaccess and directed them to one page. what i may do in the future when i see that they are no longer bringing traffic is allow google to delete them. what i have found is they are bringing in traffic which i am surprised at. they were from a component i had which was a kind of message board