Where does Wordpress store the 301 redirects?

[dballari]

Hi, I've just created a campaign for my new wordpress blog and found 11 301 redirects which I was not aware of. It looks like wordpress has created them automatically.

Does any one know how wordpress handles this issues or where are they stored so I can delete them? They are of no use for me.

9 of these redirects point to the same url with an added '/' and are in pages

1 is on a post. I've been changing the permalink and some urls several times and maybe one of these times the Wordpress has automatically created the 301 redirect. But why? I do not want to keep the old url.

the last redirect is very strange it goes from http://www.mydomain.com/folder to http://www.mydomain.com where folder is the folder where I installed wordpress. But again, I want no one to type the url with the folder name or even know this folder exists.

Any comment on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a lot,

David

[dballari]

Thanks Sha and Aran,

Thank's a lot for your explanations on 301 redirects

I see a line of code in the htaccess file (RewriteBase /) that is probably doing the 9 first redirects that I mentioned

To avoid the rest, I just exported the pages and posts, deleted all of them and imported the xml file again. Maybe this fixes it. I understand it's not important but I'd rather have them disappear.

But appart from that, before importing the file I changed the

David

[Aran_Smithson]

Hi,

There are plug ins which handle 301 redirects so I'd start by checking your plugs section and seeing what is active.

Wordpress uses a HTAccess file to store its 301's and such. However if you are inexperienced with handling a HTAccess file, I'd leave it be ad ask a expert to have a look at it as you can seriously mess up your site.

[ShaMenz]

Hi David,

Having the 301's in place is a good thing rather than a problem. They have been created by Wordpress so that you do not have broken links on your site (because you have created links and then deleted them by changing the permalink).

There are 3 major reasons for using 301 (Permanent) Redirects:

1. To move pages (or whole sites) to a new location and maintain accessibility to them
2. To eliminate broken link issues when URL's that may already have been crawled and/or seen by search engines or site users. (Links can be created by ordinary users who may have bookmarked or shared the URL)
3. To ensure that multiple URL's which render the same content are not seen by search engines as duplicate content. For example, a canonicalization issue can exist when http://mydomain.com (root domain) and http://www.mydomain.com (the subdomain) generally produce the same page of content, but can be seen as duplicates of each other because they are distinctly different URLs. Dr Pete's Duplicate Content in a Post Panda World is the definitive post on the different reasons for duplicate content and the best options for fixing them.

The 301's have no influence on users as they cannot see them - they are written to the .htaccess file. The idea of having them there is to catch any incoming traffic that comes via existing links to those pages that no longer exist.

There is a good explanation of 301 Best Practice in the Learn SEO section here at SEOmoz.

When working through the things identified in the crawl test, the Errors (red) and Warnings (yellow) are the things to pay attention to first. If you check the single line explanation above the blue tabs you will see this message "Notices are interesting facts about your pages we found while crawling." So they are not really problems that need fixing.

A couple of other great resources if you are just starting out are The Beginners Guide to SEO and the rest of the Learn SEO section.

Hope that helps,

Sha

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world