Language Tunnel - Help!
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Hi,
First post here. A few months back (before they were my client), my client updated their site to include a language tunnel. It looks like some other updates were made as well to "prettify" the site's URLs.
Unfortunately, after this update, lots of well-ranking landing pages are now completely gone with no redirects in place. Normally, I would just give them a list of these old pages and say "301 Redirect" to X page. However, as part of this site update, they added country code into the mix. So now, instead of just 6 or 7 languages, we are looking at 30-40 permutations of language and country (with some countries having multiple languages). The functionality of the new site is fine, but all of the old 404s are not being kind to the search engine traffic.
My question is: what's the best way to resolve this problem? These old pages usually specify a language code (but no country code). So, for example, I am thinking of redirecting all of the Spanish 404 urls to a Spanish "country tunnel". However, this is obviously not the same as what we had before, where the actual pages were indexed. Since my old pages no longer exist and I've got this country problem now (to stand in the way of a straightforward redirect), is there any way to appease the SEO gods on this?
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Hi there,
I'm not sure if you'll like my reply or not but this is something that we've done before when we faced a somewhat similar situation with a client. We implemented redirects using some regex code...basically filling out the spaces where you would have stuff like /us /us /es with regex jolly jokers so that any page which would fit the bill would be redirected with one smooth piece of code.
have a good day
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