Long term plan for a large htaccess file with 301 redirects
-
We setup a pretty large htaccess file in February for a site that involved over 2,000 lines of 301 redirects from old product url's to new ones.
The 'old urls' still get a lot of traffic from product review sites and other pretty good sites which we can't change.
We are now trying to reduce the page load times and we're ticking all of the boxes apart from the size of the htaccess file which seems to be causing a considerable hang on load times. The file is currently 410kb big!
My question is, what should I do in terms of a long terms strategy and has anyone came across a similar problem?
At the moment I am inclined to now remove the 2,000 lines of individual redirects and put in a 'catch all' whereby anything from the old site will go to the new site homepage.
Example code:
RedirectMatch 301 /acatalog/Manbi_Womens_Ear_Muffs.html /manbi-ear-muffs.html
RedirectMatch 301 /acatalog/Manbi_Wrist_Guards.html /manbi-wrist-guards.htmlThere is no consistency between the old urls and the new ones apart from they all sit in the subfolder /acatalog/
-
When I faced a situation with several hundred pages, I decided to to only list the most important ones. I determined the important ones by there presence in Google and the import of the page content.
I first Googled "site:www.example.com" to get a good idea of what was indexed.
I used Analytics to see if any pages were entry pages. If a page gets no hits as an entry page, the 301 redirect is never needed.
I made a list of about 100 redirects, then made the 404 error page a slight variation of my homepage.
Now if you have any pages that have links in, you will need to maintain those redirects.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How long does google takes to crawl a single site ?
lately i have been thinking , when a crawler visits an already visited site or indexed site, whats the duration of its scanning?
Algorithm Updates | | Sam09schulz0 -
What happens when a de-indexed subdomain is redirected to another de-indexed subdomain? What happens to the link juice?
Hi all, We are planning to de-index and redirect a sub domain A to sub domain B. Consequently we now need to d-index sub domain B also. What happens now to the link juice or page rank they gained from hundreds and thousands of backlinks? Will there be any ranking impact on main domain? Backlinks of these sub domains are not much relevant to main domain content. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Does Google considers the cached content of a page if it's redirected to new page?
Hi all, If we redirect an old page to some new page, we know that content relevancy between source page and this new page matters at Google. I just wonder if Google is looking at the content relevancy of old page (from cache) and new page too. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Landing page redirect along with complete content
Hi Moz community, We have a page with "keyword" we are targeting in slug like website.com/keyword/. This page doesn't have much back-links or visits like homepage. So we decided to redirect homepage to /keyword page along with complete content. Will this going to hurt? Only change anybody can notice is URL. Are there any risks involved. I think this is the best way to highlight the page we been thinking about. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Redirecting Blog WITHOUT .htaccess
Hello Mozzers! I currently have a WordPress blog on a subdomain that I'd like to redirect to a subdirectory. Unfortunately, the CMS that I am on will not allow me implement a rewrite rule because we do not have access to the server (It's on Shopify, which is a fully hosted solution). If we set up a 301 from blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog, will all my link juice be preserved? Or is it better just to keep it on the subdomain for now? I'd like to avoid importing all my content into Shopify's native blog, if I can, just because we may be moving to another CMS shortly. Thank you in advance! -Alima Team
Algorithm Updates | | okatieo0 -
Google Panda - large domain benefits
Hi, A bit of a general question, but has anyone noticed a improvement in rankings for large domains - ie well known, large sites such as Tesco, Amazon? From what I've seen, the latest Panda update seems to favour the larger sites, as opposed to smaller, niche sites. Just wondered if anyone else has noticed this too?Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Digirank0 -
Rankings drop, but only one term
Has anyone experienced a significant drop on just one term? I have about 10 terms that I am constantly monitoring and 9 out of 10 are unchanged or even improved, but 1 term was #1 and is now #11. Curious if anyone has experienced anything similar. I originally thought it was "Panda", but why wouldn't all my terms be affected??
Algorithm Updates | | MNKid150 -
301 redirect question
So I have an employer who owns a retail site and his category URLs are horrible. So, I am suggesting to him to create a new page with a pretty URL and 301 redirect the old page to the new page. I am suggesting this to him, because this will help increase CTR for the targeted keyword & help him rank higher for the term. He is apprehensive about this cause he thinks this will cause him to drop in ranking. Does anybody know any resources or have any past experiences that will back up my suggestion or his for that matter?
Algorithm Updates | | Cyle0