Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to rewrite/redirect a folder name with .htaccess
-
I have a folder in my site that I want to rename. I don’t want to just rewrite the URL and keep my old folder name, I want to change the folder name and then do whatever is necessary with .hataccess to not lose search engine rankings. The folder name I want to change has a space in it and also is misspelled (whoops x2)
Example.
Mysite.com/old foldr/page.html
Mysite.com/newfolder/page.html
How would I go about doing this with .htaccess? Do I just switch the folder name on my server and then set up a redirect, or do I do a rewrite? Sorry now familiar with the terms or .htacces.
Thanks all
-
You might possibly have to detail the white-space explicitly with \s
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^old\sfoldr/(.*) /newfolder/$1 [R=301,NC,L] -
Yes, Bradley's method will allow you to redirect everything in the folder. I thought you were just needing to re-index one file.
-
Ok thank you! Unfortunately there are LOTS of .html files within this folder, is there a way to just switch the folder name and not each individual file?
-
To 301 redirect all files in the direct to the new directory in .htaccess, try this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^old\ foldr/(.*) /newfolder/$1 [R=301,NC,L]This should redirect all HTML pages, images, you name it. It should also account for the space too.
You'll want to move all your files to the new folder location so when the redirect happens your end user doesn't receive a 404 error.
-
Yes, you will want to create a 301 redirect from the older location to the newer location.
Steps to take:
1. Change the folder on your server from /old foldr/ --> /newfolder/
2. Add this line in your .htaccess file:
redirect 301 /old%20foldr/page.html http://www.mysite.com/newfolder/page.html
**3. Make sure this is working properly. ** I like to use this 301 redirect checker tool:
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
-
Having a Subfolder/Subdirectory With a Different Design Than the Root Domain
Hi Everyone, I was wondering what Google thinks about having a subfolder/subdirectory with a different design than the root domain. So let's say we have MacroCorp Inc. which has been around for decades. MacroCorp has tens of thousands of backlinks and a couple thousand referring domains from quality sites in its industry and news sites. MacroCorp Inc. spins off one of its products into a new company called MicroCorp Inc., which makes CoolProduct. The new website for this company is CoolProduct.MacroCorp.com (a subdomain) which has very few backlinks and referring domains. To help MicroCorp rank better, both companies agree to place the MicroCorp content at MacroCorp.com/CoolProduct/. The root domain (MacroCorp.com) links to the subfolder from its navigation and MicroCorp does the same, but the MacroCorp.com/CoolProduct/ subfolder has an entirely different design than the root domain. Will MacroCorp.com/CoolProduct/ be crawled, indexed, and rank better as both companies think it would? Or would Google still treat the subfolder like a subdomain or even a separate root domain in this case? Are there any studies, documentation, or links to good or bad examples of this practice? When LinkedIn purchased Lynda.com, for instance, what if they kept the https://www.lynda.com/ design as is and placed it at https://www.linkedin.com/learning/. Would the pre-purchase (yellow/black design) https://www.linkedin.com/learning/ rank any worse than it does now with the root domain (LinkedIn) aligned design? Thanks! Andy
Web Design | | AndyRCWRCM1 -
Incorporating Spanish Page/Site
We bought an exact match domain (in Spanish) to incorporate with regular website for a particular keyword. This is our first attempt at this, and while we do have Spanish speaking staff that will translate/create a nice, quality page, we're not going to redo everything in Spanish page. Any advice on how to implement this? Do I need to create a whole other website in Spanish? Will that be duplicate content if I do? Can I just set it up to show the first page in Spanish, but if they click on anything else it redirects to our site? I'm pretty clueless on this, so if anything I've suggested is off-the-wall or a violation, I'm really just spit-balling, trying to figure out how to implement this. Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
301 Redirect all pictures when moving to a new site?
We have 30,000 pictures on our site. Moz will return 404's on some occasionally, but Google seems to ignore those. Should I 301 redirect all those images when we move to a new site lay-out? Appreciate your views!
Web Design | | Discountvc0 -
Privacy Policy: index it/? And where to place it?
Hi Everyone, Two questions, first: should you allow google to index your privacy policy? Second: for a service based site (not e-commerce, not selling anything) should you put the policy in the footer so it's site wide or just on the "contact us" form page? Best, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Is it possible to redirect the main www. domain - but keep a subdomain active?
Hi Mozzers, Quick question, which I hope one of you can answer... Let's say I have a website (i) www.example.com and on that a subdomain exists, (ii) subdomain.example.com. Let's say I want to change my main domain from www.example.com to www.newwebsite.com. I'd 301 all content, use GWT to notify Google of a change of address etc etc. Having done that, is it still possible to keep the original subdomain active? So, even though www.example.com has been redirected / transferred to www.newwebsite.com, subdomain.example.com would still exist. If that is possible, what is the implication for Domain Authority? On the one hand, I have transferred the main site (so DA from that will transfer to the new site); but part of that root domain is still active. Make sense? Any answers? Thanks everyone...
Web Design | | edlondon0 -
Display a message after 301 redirect.
I know this one is a little more technical than pure SEO, but it somewhat ties in. I'm redirecting 2 sites to one. The companies have combined, and I've imported all their content that has been created, and the url mapping is set up correctly. So it currently is set up like this: A.com --> C.com
Web Design | | WilliamBay
A.com/blogpost-1 --> C.com/blogpost-1 B.com --> C.com B.com/blogpost-20 --> C.com/blogpost-20 What i would like is some method a redirect when landing at C.com or C.com/blogpost-XX. And in turn display a message in a DIV so I can style it. And yes, I have nothing better to do on a Friday night 🙂0 -
Optimal redirect configuration from a misspelled domain that we own.
We have a handful of inbound links to www.t-chek.com (note the hyphen). Our normal site is www.tchek.com (no hyphen). We own both domains and have some sort of domain-wide redirect set up now. This works fine for traffic, but I suspect it's not optimal for SEO purposes. I came to this conclusion by looking in OSE and noticing that none of the inbound links to www.t-chek.com were also being attributed to www.tchek.com. 2 questions: Is it immediately evident what type of redirect I have in place now, or do I need to figure that out? Is the fix as simple as editing the .htaccess file on the hyphenated domain? I don't have direct control over the hyphenated domain, and I'd like to be able to know exactly what we need to do so I can request help from my IT department. I'd appreciate hearing your wisdom. Thanks!
Web Design | | SheriGolla0 -
Parked Domain or Redirect
Should I park a domain or Redirect? And what is the best way? I need to switch our domain name. I currently have all of our domains redirecting to our main website. I have set up there own hosting in our cpanel account so I could redirect them to our main domain. Was this too many steps? I tried putting all of our domains in our main domains, .htaccess file, and redirected them to our main website, but they did not work. So that is why I set up there own cpanel accounts. Now they work fine. However, my hosting company told me that I could just park the domain on our current domains account. If I can redirect all of these domain in one place, that would be great. I thought that a parked domain is considered duplicate websites, as both urls work, displaying the entire website with both urls. So Would I have to re upload our entire website to the account that I want as our main domain? Or is there another way of going about doing this?
Web Design | | hfranz0