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 can I fix multiple 404 errors with Wildcard htaccess redirect
-
Hi all I hope that someone can help....
How can I fix multiple 404 errors with Wildcard htaccess redirect
The url in question is:
How can I fix multiple 404 errors with Wildcard htaccess redirect
http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/listing/location/uk-england/bedfordshire-weddings/franklin-park
http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/deal/location/uk-england/chorley-weddings/curtis-bay
etc, going to http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business
the above is just a few examples, google webmaster is showing over 8.000 404 page not found errors.
Thanks in advance.
-
Hi Denverish, thanks for your reply, been months since i looked at this problem. It has returned so trying to sort it out. the redirects mentioned did not work. so any suggestions.
The CMS allows for 301 redirects via a form; place old url at the top of the form and the new url at the bottom and save,
But as I am trying to create a wildcard 301 redirect, i am not sure what code to place in these fields..see pic
tai
-
Hi Tai, were you able to implement Matt's suggestions?
-
Hi Tai! Any update on this issue? Please let us know so we can help! Thanks.
Christy
-
Hi Matt, sorry for the delay in getting back.
Just working on your suggestions, I will let you know if it works
T
-
Using the redirectmatch directive to redirect the entire deal directory to deals should definitely work for your situation. You then just repeat for each - so for deals:
RedirectMatch 301 /deal/(.*) /deals/$1
-
Hi Matt,
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^listing/(.*)$ http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business/ [R=301,L]Did not work,
other urls flagged up in Google WM are/deal/ new: /deals/
http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/deal/location/uk-england/buckinghamshire-weddings/newport-beach
http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/deals/
thanks Matt
-
Hi Tai,
I understand what you are saying in regards to making it easier with all the different URLs, however you will need to specify some start point in terms of being one level down from the domain root else you are effectively placing a wildcard on the whole domain, which wouldn't work when you are still working on this domain. So you need to try to identify the few main category URLs such as /listing and so on in order to create a rule.
Did the redirect I give you work for all URLs apart from the one listed? It should have worked for that.
An alternative you can try is:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^listing/(.*)$ http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business/ [R=301,L] -
Hi Matt, thanks again.
Yes we are trying to redirect old urls to the relevant pages.
As we have so many old urls from old cms system which had different url structures, to do a wildcard to catch all 404s would be great. (wordpress plugin wp redirection achieves this http://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/)
RedirectMatch 301 ^/listing/.*$ http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business
But it did not redirect
http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/listing/location/uk-england/essex-weddings
Thanks for your time on this.
Regards Tai
-
Hi Tai,
I had a look at your site homepage and from your examples I could see you have relative urls which can cause 404 errors and as you mentioned 8000 I thought this could be part of your problems - no domains in your main navigation links so /business rather than www.yourdomain.com/business in coding - so no base URL can cause this. I took one of your links you mentioned to check if your hrefs were relative.
Putting what I mentioned aside for a second do you just want anything that is /listing and /deal redirecting to /business?
Have you tried this for the listing example and repeat for the others such as /deal/:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/listing/.*$ http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business
-
Hi Matt, and thank you for your response.
Not sure if i understand the solution to this problem though. The http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/listing/......./ are from old legacy urls, and we have many. I am not sure why google webmaster is still picking up these old urls. but having 8k old not found urls is a worry.
Regards Tai
-
You can fix this issue much easier than trying to sort out redirects in htaccess. You are coming across this issue because your site uses relative URLs rather than absolute.
Example:
A relative URL isn't tied to a base URL so:
/business
Absolute would be:
www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business
Using relative means that when you visit a page your link is relative to that location so if I was on
www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business and visited the same llink it would become
www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business/business unless redirected.
Having to fix this issue in htaccess can get messy for this and it would be much simpler to change your nav links in the template of your site. I checked this was the case in your sites source code to be certain and you definitely use relative URLs.
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
-
My site auto redirects http to https. This is causing redirect chains. What can I do?
I noticed that Moz flags a lot of redirect chain issues on my site. I realized that this is mostly because the site automatically redirects http to https, and when I create a new URL (when a URL changes, for example) it is automatically flagged as a chain. Example: http://www.example-link Auto directs to: https://www.example-link Which is then redirected to: https://www.example-link-changed (when the address actually changes) I don't seem to have any control over changing where the initial http redirect goes. Any advice on fixing this problem?
On-Page Optimization | | baystatemarketing0 -
Link flow for multiple links to same URL
Hi there,
On-Page Optimization | | doctecs
my question is as follows: How does Google handle link flow if two links in a given page point to the same URL? (do they flow link individually or not?) This seems to be a newbie question, but actually it seems that there is little evidence and even also little consensus in the SEO community about this detail. Answers should include source Information about the current state of art at Google is preferable The question is not about anchor text, general best practises for linking, "PageRank is dead" etc. We do know that the "historical" PageRank was implemented (a long time ago) without special handling for multiple links, as e.g. last stated by Matt Cutts in this video: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-one-page-two-links-page-counted-first-link-192718 On the other hand, many people from the SEO community say that only the first link counts. But so far I could not find any data to back this up, which is quite surprising.0 -
"translation" of code in htaccess file
Hi everyone! I am a newbie to the whole SEO and html thing and I am trying to get a better understanding of the "behind the scenes" part of my website. I hope I can find someone here who can translate a piece of code for me that I have in my htaccess file: Options -Multiviews
On-Page Optimization | | momof4
Options +FollowSymLinks
rewritecond $1 !^(index.php|public|tmp|robots.txt|template.html|favicon.ico|images|css|uploads)
rewritecond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
rewritecond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
rewriterule ^(.*)$ index.php?link=$1 [NC,L,QSA] I know that something is getting redirected to the index file, but what (or when) exactly? Does the word "robots"mean that search engine crawlers are getting redirected here? And is this good or bad (in terms of SEO)? Or is this redirecting people who try to get to my robots/ template or image files?? Thanks in advance for any answers!0 -
Does CTR Affect Ranking & Authority? Can PPC Influence That Too?
Hi everyone, Good CTR and bounce rate seem to affect rankings positively, but what about domain authority? Is that something built entirely on links and semantics, or does CTR play a factor too? Consider a homepage ranking for its brand name. Switching off any brand PPC will increase the natural listing's CTR. Would that have a positive SEO impact on the homepage/domain?
On-Page Optimization | | tprg0 -
Redirecting deleted posts 301 vs 302
There is a category on WP where job ads are posted. when a post got deleted I would like to pass 404 error page and redirect all those deleted posts to specific category. I found WP plugin Auto Redirect 404 in 301 for Trashed Posts which does redirect deleted post to specific URL. But posts which are in the trash (not permanently deleted) will get 302 redirects. Those deleted permanently will get 301 redirects. Should I try editing this plugin or find another why? Maybe there is similar way with Redirection plugin?
On-Page Optimization | | OVJ0 -
Can I place H1 tag anywhere on page
Hello, For those of you who use Magento you will know it is not SEO friendly. When you create a category or product, the name of the product or category then becomes the H1 tag. We sell mens business shirts. For example we have a product called 'White poplin classic fit' this is also the H1 tag, nobody is ever going to search for that term so I have had my developer create a new attribute that allows me to keep the product name as it is and let's me create a new SEO friendly H1 tag, for example 'White business shirt' However, placing 'White business shirt' on the page to be visible by the visitor does not look good on the page. My question is. Can I place the H1 tag anywhere on the page? I have some tabs like below. I am thinking of add a tab in between delivery and returns called more info and placing more seo keywords including the H1 tag in this tab. Will this be OK or will this be seen as black hat technique?
On-Page Optimization | | mullsey0 -
301 redirect and then keywords in URL
Hi, Matt Cutts says that 301 redirects, including the ones on internal pages, causes the loss of a little bit of link juice. But also, I know that keywords in the URL are very important. On our site, we've got unoptimized URLs (few keywords) in the internal pages. Is it worth doing a 301 redirect in order to optimize the URLs for each main page. 301 redirects are the only way we can do it on our premade cart For example (just an example) say our main (1 of the 4) keywords for the page is "brown shoes". I'm wondering if I should redirect something like shoes.com/shoecolors.html to shoes.com/brown-shoes.html In other words, with the loss of juice would we come out ahead? In what instances would we come out ahead?
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Submitting multiple sitemaps
I recently moved over from html to wordpress. I have the google sitemap plugin on the new wordpress site, but in webmaster tools, it's only showing 71 pages, and I have hundreds, but many are html. Is it okay, to submit an html sitemap as well as the wp sitemap that's already in there?
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0