Changing URL structure of date-structured blog with 301 redirects

[IanOBrien]

Howdy Moz,

We've recently bought a new domain and we're looking to change over to it. We're also wanting to change our permalink structure. Right now, it's a WordPress site that uses the post date in the URL. As an example:

http://blog.mydomain.com/2015/01/09/my-blog-post/

We'd like to use mod_rewrite to change this using regular expressions, to:

http://newdomain.com/blog/my-blog-post/

Would this be an appropriate solution?

RedirectMatch 301 /./././(.) /blog/$1

[EricaMcGillivray]

I'd go in and change the structure in WP and then 301 the old URLs with the redirect. Then your new posts going forward will only have the cleaned up URL structure and the old ones will be properly 301'd for all the SEO goodness.

[IanOBrien]

Thanks for the response!

I should have mentioned that we are moving away from WP on the new domain.

[MonicaOConnor]

Even if you are moving away from WP, you will set up your redirects the same way. You can do that through the HTAccess file to make sure that they are pointing to the correct pages on your new site.

[IanOBrien]

Hey Monica! Thanks for your response.

On Apache, you can set redirects before the server sends you to the domain. This is a preferred method for us. Erica was kind enough to suggest using WP to do so, but with thousands of blog posts, this really isn't an option to do a 1 to 1 301 redirect for every post.

Because of that, we're looking at **mod_rewrite **instead of a 301 plugin or using .htaccess, but I'm a little fuzzy on the appropriate syntax for it to work correctly.

[MonicaOConnor]

Whether you use a mod_rewrite or a 1 - 1 301, the end result is a 301 redirect. If you are changing the URL at all, even from http to https, you will need to tell Google that the URL has moved, hence, the 301 redirect. If you do not 301 redirect your old URLs you will lose all SEO value, traffic and link juice for the old URLs.

Does that make sense? Setting the redirects in Apache is simply a shortcut to the 301 step. Whichever path you take, you are ending at a 301.

And the syntax you wrote above looks correct for the rewrite script.

[IanOBrien]

Thanks! Yes, in my original post, I ask if the format of the mod_rewrite is correct for a 301 redirect. I realize we need 301 redirects. I am wanting to do it so I don't have to do a direct 1 to 1 for every page:

We'd like to use mod_rewrite to change this using regular expressions, to:

http://newdomain.com/blog/my-blog-post/

Would this be an appropriate solution?

RedirectMatch 301 /./././(.) /blog/$1

[MonicaOConnor]

Yes, sorry, I missed that part! That looks great.