Redirect old "not found" url (at http) to new corresponding page (now at https)
-
My least favorite part of SEO
I'm trying to redirect an old url that no longer exists to our new website that is built with https.
The old url: http://www.thinworks.com/palm-beach-gardens-team/
New url: https://www.thinworks.com/palm-beach-gardens/
This isn't working with my standard process of the quick redirection plugin in WP or through htaccess because the old site url is at http and not https.
Any help would be much appreciated! How do I accomplish this, where do I do it and what's the code I'd use?
Thank you Moz community!
Ricky
-
Hey Avin,
Don't worry about it anymore. I flipped my personal site running WordPress over to SSL last month and I'll tell you everything I did to make it work. Thomas mentioned, "you should be forcing HTTPS", and he's right but what the Yoast plugin lacks in forcing an HTTPS redirect, you can achieve with a WordPress Plugin.
If you want to see it working for my site, just go to http://www.kingrosales.com and watch it work
Here's what I did:
1. Install the WordPress HTTPS plugin. I found another plugin before this one called, HTTPS Redirection, but it didn't do the job.
2. One of the thinks that you will also need to do is change all the hardcoded links to images within your content that may be calling the http version. If you don't, any images or embedded content from your site will cause the browser show that your site is trying to be https but some components are not, so you're gonna get a caution sign over the padlock.
You can do one of two things to fix all these hard coded links to content within your site:
- Go through each page and post and change the img src to the https version.
- Open phpmyadmin and go run an SQL query to find and replace http with https.
In the Yoast SEO plugin, check the Edit Files area so you can check the htaccess file. In mine, it looks like eventhough I disabled the HTTPS Redirection plugin, it has some lines in there placed above all the other rules:
BEGIN HTTPS Redirection Plugin
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]</ifmodule>END HTTPS Redirection Plugin
3. Lastly, install the Redirection plugin by John Godley so you can manage any other 301 redirects manually. Its an awesome tool and I wish I had installed this a long time ago. It has a log of all 404 and then you can just click the "Add Redirection" and when you scroll to the bottom (because nothing appears to happen when you click it), it will give you a form where you just have to put the URL of the new slug.
I hope it helps!
-
Along with Redirection I think the Yoast WordPress SEO premium plug-in is probably the best redirection and search plug-in for WordPress.
One thing I wanted to let you know is that you are showing HTTPS you should be forcing HTTPS though I do not believe it has anything to do with this particular issue.
Add the following redirect to the the top of your .htaccess file:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/palm-beach-gardens/$ https://www.thinworks.com/palm-beach-gardens-team/?p=$
You may need to implement force HTTPS
Use https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-force-https/
of course depending on your hosting provider and other factors you can do one better and implement it in this method
sincerely,
Thomas
-
I use the Yoast SEO plugin. It has a great utility for redirects. It's only in the paid version though. It's worth the $ but it's not cheap. $89
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
-
72KB CSS code directly in the page header (not in external CSS file). Done for faster "above the fold" loading. Any problem with this?
To optimize for googles page speed, our developer has moved the 72KB CSS code directly in the page header (not in external CCS file). This way the above the fold loading time was reduced. But may this affect indexing of the page or have any other negative side effects on rankings? I made a quick test and google cache seems to have our full pages cached, but may it affect somehow negatively our rankings or that google indexes fewer of our pages (here we have some problems with google ignoring about 30% of our pages in our sitemap".)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
How do you 301 redirect URLs with a hashbang (#!) format? We just lost a ton of pagerank because we thought javascript redirect was the only way! But other sites have been able to do this – examples and details inside
Hi Moz, Here's more info on our problem, and thanks for reading! We’re trying to Create 301 redirects for 44 pages on site.com. We’re having trouble 301 redirecting these pages, possibly because they are AJAX and have hashbangs in the URLs. These are locations pages. The old locations URLs are in the following format: www.site.com/locations/#!new-york and the new URLs that we want to redirect to are in this format: www.site.com/locations/new-york We have not been able to create these redirects using Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v.1.5.3.2. The CMS is WordPress version 3.9.1 The reason we want to 301 redirect these pages is because we have created new pages to replace them, and we want to pass pagerank from the old pages to the new. A 301 redirect is the ideal way to pass pagerank. Examples of pages that are able to 301 redirect hashbang URLs include http://www.sherrilltree.com/Saddles#!Saddles and https://twitter.com/#!RobOusbey.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
We are switching our CMS local pages from a subdomain approach to a subfolder approach. What's the best way to handle this? Should we redirect every local subdomain page to its new subfolder page?
We are looking to create a new subfolder approach within our website versus our current subdomain approach. How should we go about handling this politely as to not lose everything we've worked on up to this point using the subdomain approach? Do we need to redirect every subdomain URL to the new subfolder page? Our current local pages subdomain set up: stores.websitename.com How we plan on adding our new local subfolder set-up: websitename.com/stores/state/city/storelocation Any and all help is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO.CIC0 -
"No index" page still shows in search results and paginated pages shows page 2 in results
I have "no index, follow" on some pages, which I set 2 weeks ago. Today I see one of these pages showing in Google Search Results. I am using rel=next prev on pages, yet Page 2 of a string of pages showed up in results before Page 1. What could be the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Keep Pages with Old Dates?
We have a tourism related site. We list annual events. Right now the URL extension includes the year. I assume it is better to keep the same page and update the dates, thereby keeping any links, ranking trust and authority we built. Is that the best strategy by updating the event info with the new dates? I would assume with a new page for the new year we would be starting over again and would have too much similar content and link diffusion. And in the future are we better off not including the year in the URL extension?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ebtec0 -
Why are new pages not being indexed, and old pages (now in robots.txt) remain in the index?
I currently have a site that was recently restructured, causing much of its content to be reposted, creating new URL's for each page. To avoid duplicates, all of the existing pages were added to the robots file. That said, it has now been over a week - I know Google has recrawled the site - and when I search for term X, it is stil the old page that is ranking, with the new one nowhere to be seen. I'm assuming it's a cached version, but why are so many of the old pages still appearing in the index? Furthermore, all "tags" pages (it's a Q&A site, like this one) were also added to the robots a few months ago, yet I think they are all still appearing in the index. Anyone got any ideas about why this is happening, and how I can get my new pages indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corp08030 -
Automatic redirect to external urls
Hi, there is a way to create a "bridge page" with automatic url redirect ( 302 ) without google penalization? In this moment, my bridge pages are indexed on google with title and description of the redirected page.. Thanks in advance. Mauro.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raulo790 -
To "Rel canon" or not to "Rel canon" that is the question
Looking for some input on a SEO situation that I'm struggling with. I guess you could say it's a usability vs Google situation. The situation is as follows: On a specific shop (lets say it's selling t-shirts). The products are sorted as follows each t-shit have a master and x number of variants (a color). we have a product listing in this listing all the different colors (variants) are shown. When you click one of the t-shirts (eg: blue) you get redirected to the product master, where some code on the page tells the master that it should change the color selectors to the blue color. This information the page gets from a query string in the URL. Now I could let Google index each URL for each color, and sort it out that way. except for the fact that the text doesn't change at all. Only thing that changes is the product image and that is changed with ajax in such a way that Google, most likely, won't notice that fact. ergo producing "duplicate content" problems. Ok! So I could sort this problem with a "rel canon" but then we are in a situation where the only thing that tells Google that we are talking about a blue t-shirt is the link to the master from the product listing. We end up in a situation where the master is the only one getting indexed, not a problem except for when people come from google directly to the product, I have no way of telling what color the costumer is looking for and hence won't know what image to serve her. Now I could tell my client that they have to write a unique text for each varient but with 100 of thousands of variant combinations this is not realistic ir a real good solution. I kinda need a new idea, any input idea or brain wave would be very welcome. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0