301 Redirect Issue

[EntrustSEO]

I'm having an issue with 301 redirects:

Let's see if I can verbalize my thoughts on this one...

So we just recently moved our site to Wordpress. One of our new 301 commands is redirecting oursite.com/news to oursite.com/blog . However there are other links from our previous site that look like oursite.com/news/XYZ and the issue is that, because wordpress structures its links differently, that URL is not equivalent to oursite.com/blog/XYZ. Instead, it might look something more like oursite.com/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ or something. Does that make sense?

The issue is that when I find an old link of ours on google that looks something like "oursite.com/news/XYZ" or "oursite.com/news/ABC" it is automatically replacing "news" with "blog". When I try to go in manually and redirect anything that says "/news/XYZ" to "/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ" it still doesn't work. It still just replaces "news" with "blog."

Wow I realize that might not make sense to anyone but if it does - please advise!!

Thanks!!!!

[DanDeceuster]

It sounds like more of a permalink issue in wordpress than a redirect issue. Under settings on the left sidebar in your wordpress dashboard is a link called permalinks. Go there and let us know what it says there. You probably want a custom structure that says /%postname%/ so that your blog will make permalinks like site.com /blog/postname instead of site.com /blog/category/postname or whatever else might be going on there.

Get the simple 301 redirect plugin and make sure you do redirect every old URL to its new counterpart, but make sure your new ones look the way you want first.

[EntrustSEO]

Hey Daniel. Thanks for your response - the only problem is that we already have /%postname% selected. It is working for mostly every blog entry except this one that I'm running into problems with. I'll show you the exact URL that's giving us the problem.

On google, it shows the URL as:

oursite.com/news?tag=business-2

Then it seems to be redirecting it to:

oursite.com/blog?tag=business-2

However, that site does not exist. It should be

http://oursite.com/category/business

I tried to literally 301 redirect both oursite.com/news?tag=business-2 and  http://oursite.com/category/business to  http://oursite.com/category/business but neither worked.

Thoughts?

[Tom-Anthony]

Hi!

The problem you have is that you are using two different Apache extensions and I don't believe you can control the order the go in. You are using mod_alias and mod_rewrite.

It sounds like you have a line like:

Redirect permanent /news/dinosaur/ninja http://www.oursite.com/blog/ninja

This is the mod_alias rule, and it is firing before your mod_rewrite rules (and then it no longer fits their criteria, so they don't fire).

So, what you need to do is change your mod_alias rules into mod_rewrite rules, so then you can control the order (they execute top to bottom, so you just put your 'specific' redirects above your general ones). You rule should look something like this (I've not confirmed!):

RewriteRule ^/news/dinosaur/ninja/$ /blog/ninja/ [L,R=301]

I hope all that make sense. Let me know how you get on!

[DanDeceuster]

Ah you have a parameter in the old URL. That ? is the real trick here. because you redirected /news to /blog it will redirect /news?anythingyouputhere to /blog?anythingyouputhere if that makes sense.

Did you try to redirect /blog?tag=business-2 to /blog/category/business yet?

[EntrustSEO]

Wow thanks so much. This might be way over my head (I know very little about web development) but I'm going to talk to our devs about it. Thanks again!!

[EntrustSEO]

I did try that. Not sure why it isn't working but I think it has something to do with Tom's answer below. Heh. Thanks though Daniel!!