Setting up a 301 redirect from expired webpages
-
Hi Guys,
We have recently created a new website for one of our clients and replaced their old website on the same domain. One problem that we are having is that all of the old pages are indexed within Google (1000s) and are just getting sent to our custom 404 page. We are finding that there is an large bounce rate from this and also, I am worried from an SEO point of view that the site could lose rank positioning through the number of crawl errors that Google is getting.
Want I want is to set up a 301 redirect from these pages to go to the 'our brands' page. The reason for this is that the majority of the old URLs linked to individual product pages, and one thing to note is that they are all .asp pages.
Is there a way of setting up a rule in the htaccess file (or another way) to say that all webpages that end with the suffix of .asp will be 301 redirected to the our brands' page? (there is no .asp pages on the new site as it is all done in php).
If so, I would love it if someone could post the code snippet. Thanks in advance guys and if you have any other ideas then be my guest to suggest
Matt.
-
Make sure and back up you .htaccess before making any changes...
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*).asp$ $1.php [R=301,L]Would convert all asp to php
but this would only work if you kept your directory structure the same
Example
Old Structure http://www.somedomain.com/about.asp
New Structure http://www.somedomain.com/about.php
If you did not you will need to do it manually for each page
Redirect 301 /about.asp http://www.somedomain.com/about-Us.php
If there are spaces, be sure to use quotes
Redirect 301 "/about us.asp" http://www.somedomain.com/about-Us.php
There could be other easier ways, but if I read correctly above, this would be my suggestions
And of course as TIm suggests above, the proper SEO process would be manually for each page, redirecting to its proper counterpart (if it is indexed, and has links pointing to it or a User Experience page)
Shane
-
To answer your question directly - yes, there's a rule to put in .htaccess for this. It would be something like:
RewriteRule (.*).asp$ http://www.link.to/ourbrandspage (someone who knows regex better may correct me on this)
However, redirecting everything to the same page is a bit of a waste - if the site has been around for a long time, then there may be inbound links to deep pages in the site which would be better off being redirected to the appropriate page on the new URL structure rather than dumping everyone on the same page.
If there's a pattern match which you can follow, then you can write regex to cope with this (e.g. if the old structure was http://www.whatever.com/blah.asp and the new one is http://www.whatever.com/blah.php then just do an .htaccess redirect from *.asp to .php - something like RewriteRule (.).asp $1.php). However, I'm going to bet it's not that simple.
Best is to do a proper map of existing links so you can direct the actual old URL to the most relevant URL on the new site.
I've had to do this kind of "emergency redirect fix" before, for sites with a lot of pages and no neat "pattern match" fix. The way I usually approach it is to try and get a list of the existing URL structure (either: from a back up version of the site, from Google analytics, from webmaster tools or at a pinch you can scrape the SERPs) to grab all the possible/indexed URLs and stick them in a spreadsheet. I then prioritise the highest traffic pages - if you can see via Google Analytics (or server logs) which pages get the most inbound traffic, redirect those first to the most appropriate page on the new structure. That way you can carry on adding new rules into the .htaccess as you go along - you'll probably find of the 1000s of old pages, there's a relatively small %age which get the vast majority of inbound traffic.
Hope this helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Reusing an already 301 redirected URL for a very important keyword
I have a question about reusing an already 301 redirected URL Till now I never reused an URLs that has been already redirected with a 301 redirect. However, I just started working on a website where in past they created a lot of 301 redirects without thinking about the future, and now certain URLs, that are currently redirected with a 301, would be very useful (exact match) and needed (for some of the most important keywords for this specific business), to maintain an optimal, homogeneous and "beautiful" URL structure. Has any of you ever reused a URL that was previously redirected with a 301 redirect? If yes what are your experiences with it? Can content on the reused URL (that was previously 301 redirected and than the redirect removed) normally rank if the page is reestablished and the redirect is removed (and you do great content, on page, internal linking, backlinking, .... ) or is such an URL risky / not recommended / "burned" forever and not recommended to be reused again... especially for very important keywords since it present the exact match ?! Thank you very much for all your help! Regards
Technical SEO | | moz46y0 -
Forced Redirects/HTTP<>HTTPS 301 Question
Hi All, Sorry for what's about to be a long-ish question, but tl;dr: Has anyone else had experience with a 301 redirect at the server level between HTTP and HTTPS versions of a site in order to maintain accurate social media share counts? This is new to me and I'm wondering how common it is. I'm having issues with this forced redirect between HTTP/HTTPS as outlined below and am struggling to find any information that will help me to troubleshoot this or better understand the situation. If anyone has any recommendations for things to try or sources to read up on, I'd appreciate it. I'm especially concerned about any issues that this may be causing at the SEO level and the known-unknowns. A magazine I work for recently relaunched after switching platforms from Atavist to Newspack (which is run via WordPress). Since then, we've been having some issues with 301s, but they relate to new stories that are native to our new platform/CMS and have had zero URL changes. We've always used HTTPS. Basically, the preview for any post we make linking to the new site, including these new (non-migrated pages) on Facebook previews as a 301 in the title and with no image. This also overrides the social media metadata we set through Yoast Premium. I ran some of the links through the Facebook debugger and it appears that Facebook is reading these links to our site (using https) as redirects to http that then redirect to https. I was told by our tech support person on Newspack's team that this is intentional, so that Facebook will maintain accurate share counts versus separate share counts for http/https, however this forced redirect seems to be failing if we can't post our links with any metadata. (The only way to reliably fix is by adding a query parameter to each URL which, obviously, still gives us inaccurate share counts.) This is the first time I've encountered this intentional redirect thing and I've asked a few times for more information about how it's set up just for my own edification, but all I can get is that it’s something managed at the server level and is designed to prevent separate share counts for HTTP and HTTPS. Has anyone encountered this method before, and can anyone either explain it to me or point me in the direction of a resource where I can learn more about how it's configured as well as the pros and cons? I'm especially concerned about our SEO with this and how this may impact the way search engines read our site. So far, nothing's come up on scans, but I'd like to stay one step ahead of this. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | ogiovetti0 -
HTacess 301 redirect with special characters
Hello moz community ! I would to make a special 301 redirection through my htaccess file. I am a total noob concerning regexp and 301 redirection. I would like to redirect(301) this url : http://www.legipermis.com/stages-points/">http://www.legipermis.com/stages-points/</a></p>; yes yes it's in the index of google, this strange url includes the last ; to http://www.legipermis.com/stages-points/ I have already include a canonical tag by security, i would like to remove url with a 301 redirection and by remove this url through GWT (but the removal tool can't "eat' this kind of URL) Please consider the fact that i am not an expert about 301 redirections and regexps. No 301 redirect generator works properly for such a strange URL (which triggers content duplication corrected anyway with canonical tag). Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | LegiPermis0 -
301 redirects - an ongoing argument in our agency
ok fellow marketers. we have an on-going argument in our office regarding 301 redirects. for seo best practices, should a 301 be done at the registrar level or in the htaccess file. We have arguments going both ways and I'd love to hear what everyone has to say about it. Thanks, Stephan
Technical SEO | | Stephan_Boehringer0 -
301 redirect to new website
We are migrating to a new website that will be using entirely new URLs under the same domain as the old website. The old website is a custom PHP script and the new website uses Drupal. I know that I should use individual 301 redirects to the corresponding new pages. My question is just how to set up the hundreds of 301 redirects from the old website to the new one? Here is the process I've come up with. Please let me know if there is an easier and better way for this. Before actually changing to the new website: download an advanced report with all pages on this domain from OSE. Find corresponding pages on the new website Make the hundreds of 301 redirect lines in an .htaccess file with the following code: redirect 301 /oldurl.html http://domain.com/the-full-url Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | qbeeker0 -
301 Redirect question www to root.com
I have a site that has been up for a few weeks now and is currently in a www format and i am considering changing it to just mydomain.com I also have quite a few directory listings (including google places/bing) for this site w/ the www. url. If i do this, change it in my google analytics, and update my wordpress internal page + htaccess file. Will i lose any of the link juice i had from my www pages? Would this be something that would be advised since i've registered for many sites, or is there a potential that this could end up hurting me? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | tgr0ss0 -
Is it better to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Is it better for SEO to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Technical SEO | | CustomOnlineMarketing0 -
Redirect
How do I redirect this url: http://www.example.com/img/head/beauty-spa.jpg" width="114" height="50" alt="image"/></a> </div> <div class="c0 r"><a href="/m/imgres?q=short+holiday+treatments Thank you for your help.
Technical SEO | | petrakraft0