If you’re not using redirects properly when you rebuild or otherwise change your website, you’re losing backlinks. I maintain a website that has a significant number of links on it. Many of those are in an archived news section. When the links die for one reason or another I simply delete them because they’re no longer of much use to anyone in the archive. The result, the webmasters of those pages are losing some solid backlinks. While it’s not the end of the world to lose a few backlinks, you have to ask how much time you’re going to spend re-acquiring the backlinks you will lose to URL changes. It will take a lot longer than it would to make a list of redirects from your old URLs to your new ones I can guarantee.
Sometimes you just need to get rid of something and it doesn’t really make sense to redirect somewhere else because that content is now gone. That’s ok, but if you’re restructuring your URLs for whatever reason, you need to map the old to the new because as the old saying goes, cool URLs don’t change.
I’ve written a bit more about why you should use redirects over at About A Webmaster if you’re looking for more information.
redirect, web development
(4 votes, average: 3 out of 5)
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15 responses so far ↓
1 HMTKSteve // Feb 21, 2007 at 9:02 am
I recently moved my blog from a /blog directory to my root directory. I had to be careful and write up a php script to take visitors following old links and redirect them to the new links.
I attempted to use a 303 redirect for this but that did not work as most of the links were to index.php followed by an argument. The redirect would dump all calls to index.php (ignoreing the arguments) right back on my new blogs index page.
2 Marc // Feb 21, 2007 at 11:16 am
At the very least you’re aware of the issue and that’s half the battle. I never completely give up on a link before deleting it, but if I can’t find where it should be linking to quickly, I usually give up and move on. So if one of your links had been one on my list, I would have found the new URL and fixed it
Search Engines aren’t quite as diligent though.
3 HMTKSteve // Feb 21, 2007 at 11:24 am
I also use a sitemap.xml file.
I just did not want to lose the high number of search engine traffic hits I get everyday. The link forwarding (via php) is near seamless.
4 Dawud Miracle // Feb 21, 2007 at 11:33 am
I couldn’t agree more. I just went through this when I took my static website down and integrated it into my blog. I had to write a huge .htaccess file to account for the dozens of pages that changed URLs. But it’s worked great.
5 Josh // Feb 21, 2007 at 11:45 am
We recently moved our blog from Typepad to a hosted WordPress install for various reasons. It really urked me that Typepad doesn’t have a way to setup redirects. How frustrating! However, I should have originally launched on Typepad with my own domain so bad on me.
6 HMTKSteve // Feb 21, 2007 at 11:59 am
It took me a while to figure out how to redirect all of the old incomming links. Part of the problem is that the Serendipity blog used /index.php?[argument] for URL generation and using a .htaccess file with redirect would only redicrect the index.php and ignore the following argument.
I wanted to do a basic redirect via the .htaccess file but no dice for me!
Instead I built a new index.php page that takes the incoming argument, pulls any invalid characters, and sends the user to the new URL.
I think tonight I’ll throw the code up on my blog.
I thought I could emulate the full URL from the old blog but WordPress does not like the “?” in the URL…
7 Marc // Feb 21, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Dawud: It’s well worth the effort after you’re finished isn’t it
Josh: I once read a quote that said the only way to get good judgment is from making mistakes and the only way to make mistakes is through bad judgment. Any tips, tricks or advice I write about on this blog normally comes from a hard lesson learned on my part
Steve: That sounds like a nice solution to a tough problem. I’m sure people would appreciate you sharing it with all on your blog.
I think I might need to pick up the nested comments plugin…
8 HMTKSteve // Feb 21, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Consider it done. You can find How to redirect with PHP on my blog.
9 Marc // Feb 21, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Great post, I’m sure that will help others that share your problem.
10 David Bradley // Feb 22, 2007 at 2:40 pm
If you’ve moved to new blogger for your blogging blog you might not realize that it’s now possible to do a proper 301 redirect to your own domain from the old blogger address. More on that here
11 vestel // Feb 23, 2007 at 12:33 pm
I was changing structure from copperred.net/kukish to kukish.copperred.netsome time ago for my lineage2 blog. There were more than hundreds of this redirection rules in my configuration files. But now my friend is thinking on changing domain name at all, and i think it will be hard for me to put such number of redirects again.
12 Marc // Feb 23, 2007 at 3:04 pm
If you’re changing the domain name you should still work to build the redirects. If you don’t then it’s as if you’ve created a brand new website from scratch. If that’s ok with you, that’s fine but be sure you’re aware of what it’s going to cost.
13 Frank // Mar 5, 2007 at 9:50 pm
I have to say that this has certainly opened my eyes to something that I hadn’t really thought of as being a problem before. I wonder if there are plugins just for this purpose.
It makes me not want to change domains in a hurry, that’s for sure.
14 Marc // Mar 6, 2007 at 3:15 pm
I’m not sure about plugins, you’d have to go hunting for that.
With regards to changing your domain, there’s nothing wrong with it so long as you redirect properly. If you’re keeping the same URL structure then that should just be one redirect statement. The trouble comes when you want to redirect from an old directory structure to a new one.
15 Erwin // Apr 21, 2007 at 3:47 pm
Great tips! Thanks!