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Redirection Puzzle - it's got me puzzled anyhow! The finished website has just been converted from an old aspx affair to a wordpress site. Some directory structures have changed significantly; there appears to be a load of older medical articles that have not been added back in and it sounds unlikely that they will be. Therefore unmatched old news articles need to be pointed to the top news page to keep hold of any link value they may have accrued. The htaccess file starts with ithemes security's code, Followed by the main wordpress block and I have added the user redirects to the final section of the htaccess file . I have been through the redirects and rewrites line by line to verify them and the following sections are giving me problems. This is probably just my aging brain failing to grasp basic logic. If I can tap into anybody's wisdom for a bit of help I would appreciate it. My eyes and brain are gone to jelly. I have used htaccesscheck.com to check out the underlying syntax and ironed out the basic errors that I had previously missed. The bulk of the redirects are working correctly. #Here there are some very long media URLs which are absent on the new site and I am simply redirecting visiting spiders to the page that will hold media in future. Media items refuse to redirect
Line 408 redirect 301 /Professionals/Biomedicalforum/Recordedfora/Rich%20Media%20http:/kplayer.kcl.ac.uk/ess/echo/presentation/15885525-ff02-4ab2-b0b9-9ba9d97ca266 http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/biomedical-forum/recorded-fora/ Line 409 redirect 301 /Professionals/Biomedicalforum/Recordedfora/Quicktime%20http:/kplayer.kcl.ac.uk/ess/echo/presentation/15885525-ff02-4ab2-b0b9-9ba9d97ca266/media.m4v http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/biomedical-forum/recorded-fora/ Line 410 redirect 301 /Professionals/Biomedicalforum/Recordedfora/Mp3%20http:/kplayer.kcl.ac.uk/ess/echo/presentation/15885525-ff02-4ab2-b0b9-9ba9d97ca266/media.mp3 http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/biomedical-forum/recorded-fora/ #Old site pagination URLs redirected to new "news" top level page - Here I am simply pointing all the pagination URLs for the news section, that were indexed, to the main news page. These work but append the pagination code on to the new visible URL. Have I got the syntax correct in this version of the lines to suppress the appended garbage? RewriteRule ^/LatestNews.aspx(?:.*) http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/? [R=301,L] #On the old site many news directories (blog effectively) contained articles  that are unmatched on the new site, have been redirected to new top level news (blog) page: In this section I became confused about whether to use Redirect Match or RewriteRule to point the articles in each year directory back to the top level news page. When I have added a redirectmatch command - it has been disabling the whole site! Despite my syntax check telling me it is syntactically correct. Currently I'm getting a 404 for any of the old URLs in these year by year directories, instead of a successful redirect. I suspect Regex lingo is not clicking for me 😉 My logic here was rewrite any aspx file in the directory to the latest news page at the top. This is my latest attempt to rectify the fault. Am I nearer with my syntax or my logic? The actual URLs and paths have been substituted, but the structure is the same). So what I believe I have set up is: in an earlier section; News posts that have been recreated in the new site are redirected 1 - 1 and they are working successfully. If a matching URL is not found, when the parsing of the file reaches the line for the 1934 directory it should read any remaining .aspx URL request and rewrite it to the latest news page as a 301 and stop processing this block of commands. The subsequent commands in this block repeat the process for the other year groups of posts. Clearly I am failing to comprehend something and illumination would be gratefully received. RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1934/(.*).aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] #------Old site 1933 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1933/(.*).aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] #------Old site 1932 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1932/(.*)/.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] #------Old site 1931 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1931/(.*)/.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] #------Old site 1930 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1930/(.*)/.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] Many thanks if anyone can help me understand the logic at work here.

A new client has come to me because they have found themselves in hot water with Google having received a manual spam action for unnatural inbound links. The sad case in this story is that I completely believe that the client has been a victim of an attack by a competitor. They finally made it onto page 1 in their competitive niche, and within a few days random links started appearing on spammy sites (often foreign language sites.) By the time the message came from Google about 2 weeks later several thousand of these links had been built. The first stage was to get the client to be very honest with me about anything he personally had done that might be considered manipulative. Unfortunately following some bad advice several months ago the client purchased one site-wide link (already in the process of removing it.) The same company that gave him this advice also built just under 100 links to his website (over the course of a couple of days) in early December. So - we know the client hasn't been whiter than white, and we are going to undo anything that he had responsibility for asap. We are also working to ensure that he is earning really high quality links in the right way (already have some great press coverage in the pipeline and are working on unique content.) My question is - given some past mistakes made by the client - is there any way that we credibly get across the fact that this recent huge volume of spam is absolutely nothing to do with him in a reconsideration request? Of course we can start work on removing these links and can disavow anything we can't remove - but my expectation is that should this be successful the same competitor is going to continue throwing spam links at my client. I appreciate that previous actions by the client would in themselves have been worthy of a manual spam action - but it seems far too much of a coincidence given the timing if this penalty was unrelated to the recent attack. I'd really appreciate any insights from the Moz community and will look forward to sharing our eventual success story as a YouMoz post! Tom

Hi I'm working on a clients site that has an odd structure with 8000+ 302 temporary redirects. They are related to actions on the site (they have to be there and work this way for the site to function) but they also have a stupid number of perameters. Would it be ok to block them all in the robots.txt file? Would that make any difference?