Changing URL structure of date-structured blog with 301 redirects
-
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
-
Yes, sorry, I missed that part! That looks great.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Thanks for the response!
I should have mentioned that we are moving away from WP on the new domain.
-
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.
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
-
URL structure for new product launch
Hello, I work for a company (let's call it companyX) that is about to launch a new product, lets call it ProductY. www.CompanyX.com is an old domain with a good domain authority. The market in which ProductY is being launched is extremely competitive. The marketing department want's to launch ProductY on a new website at www.ProductY.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lvet
My opinion is that we should instead create a subfolder with product information at www.CompanyX.com/ProductY. By doing this we could leverage on the existing domain authority of CompanyX.com Additionally for campaigns, and in order to have a more memorable URL we could use ProductY.com with a 301 redirect to www.CompanyX.com/ProductY What do you think is the best strategy from an SEO point of view? Cheers
Luca0 -
410 or 301 after URL update?
Hi there, A site i'm working on atm has a thousand "not found" errors on google console (of course, I'm sure there are thousands more it's not showing us!). The issue is a lot of them seem to come from a URL change. Damage has been done, the URLs have been changed and I can't stop that... but as you can imagine, i'm keen to fix as many as humanly possible. I don't want to go mad with 301s - but for external links in, this seems like the best solution? On the other hand, Google is reading internal links that simply aren't there anymore. Is it better to hunt down the new page and 301-it anyway? OR should I 410 and grit my teeth while google crawls and recrawls it, warning me that this page really doesn't exist? Essentially I guess I'm asking, how many 301s are too many and will affect our DA? And what's the best solution for dealing with mass 404 errors - many of which aren't attached or linked to from any other pages anymore? Thanks for any insights 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra0 -
301 redirect to avoid duplicate content penalty
I have two websites with identical content. Haya and ethnic Both websites have similar products. I would like to get rid of ethniccode I have already started to de-index ethniccode. My question is, Will I get any SEO benefit or Will it be harmful if I 301 direct the below only URL’s https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez -> https://www.hayacreations/collections/salwar-kameez https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez/anarkali-suits - > https://www.hayacreations/collections/anarkali-suits
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
What is the Good URL structure for Blog posts
Please let me know what is the goood URL structure for blog posts http://www.abc.com/postname/ or http://www.abc.com/�tegory%/%postname% If Category, Can we name it Blog like website/blog/postname or it is good to use actual categories, and How many categories we can use?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael.Leonard0 -
Irrelevant backlinks - will 301 redirect cleanse the relationship?
My client has thousands of clients for whom they provided websites that used to reside in a subdirectory of their own domain. They moved them to their own domains but there are tens of thousands of backlinks on those sites pointing back to the original domain. Those backlinks are completely irrelevant and are probably hurting them by sending the wrong signals to Google on what this site really is about. My question is will the 301 redirect be enough to cleanse the relationship between my client and all their clients' sites or should I ask the client to clean up all those backlinks on their clients' sites and remove their domain from the target urls? That's a huge job, obviously.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katandmouse0 -
Pages that 301 redirect to a 404
We are going through a website redesign that involves changing URL's for the pages on our site. Currently all our pages are in the format domain.com/example.html and we are moving to stip off the .html file extension so it would just be domain.com/example We have thousands of pages as the site deals with news so building a redirect for each individual page isn't really feasible. My plan is to have a generic rewrite rule that redirects any page that ends .html to the stripped off version of this. A problem I can see with this is that it will also redirect pages that don't exist. So for example, domain.com/non-existant-page.html would 301 to domain.com/non-existant-page which would then return a 404 status. What would the SEO repercussions be for this? Obviously if a page doesn't exist already then it shouldn't show up in the search engine indexes and shouldn't be a problem but I'm a bit worried about how old pages that currently legitimately 404 will be treated when they start to 301 redirect to a 404 instead. Not sure if there any other potential issues from this that I've missed either? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbb0240 -
Does this work as a tactic for including keyword in URL structure
Howdy, I'm planning out a website and need to plan out the URL structure for best SEO value. Generally I would do something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive
site.com/widgetssite.com/widgets/large
site.com/widgets/large/blue
etc. I think this is a pretty straight forward SEO tactic. The issue I have with it is in terms of natural language the "thing" you are searching for in this case is a widget, so typically you would type/search [adjective] [noun], or in this case "large blue widgets." So one proposal I have is to instead append the "widget" to the end of the URL:
site.com/large-widgets
site.com/large/blue-widgets
site.com/large/blue/square-widgets
etc. Obviously this breaks the whole silo concept since the square-widgets page is inside the /blue directory but the blue widgets page isn't at /blue it is /blue-widgets. My solution is to setup 301 redirects from /blue to /blue-widgets (even thought there are no site links pointing to that page). Does this seem like a good idea? Or does this break the whole folder silo concept? What I like about it is that it feels more user friendly in terms of natural language and for certain high value keywords we can get certain pairings of words into the URL more like how a person would type them in.0 -
URL formating is it worth changing?
One of my clients sites has almost OK URL's, set up something like the following: keyword2_keyword3_keyword1 Ideally the URL's would be more like this: keyword1-keyword2-keyword3 My question is is there any point in changing them and 301 redirecting them over just to get the target keywords in a better order and change the _ to a - ? Has anyone tried this and its worked or not worked, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Justin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrouchyKids0