Implementing 301 redirects for old links.

Newbie Joined: Nov 01, 2006 Posts: 10

This issue has also been discussed on
http://ravenphpscripts.com/postt12071.html
and
http://ravenphpscripts.com/postt8614.html

The TegoNuke works just fine, no doubt. However, if you implement the mod on any existing site already been indexed/cached in various search engines you will get into "trouble".

By saying trouble i mean the duplicate page penalty syndrome. We all suffer from it, one way or another, no doubt. PhpBB generate alot of these by default, with or without mod_rewrite.

Compare
http://montegoscripts.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=136
with
http://montegoscripts.com/ftopict-136.html
Yeah, they are exactly the same page...or, hang on...is it? For us, yes...for a search engine? No, not from what i know...it treats the two links as two different pages, discover that it's content is the same and sets a "penalty" on both. Result is low page rank and hard to find in any search result on google, yahoo, msn...and probably others. Typically you will find these duped pages as supplemental results when you go google for "site:www.yourdomain.com" ...and we don't want our pages showing up as supplementals, we want'em to show up as unique content (yes, there are other reasons aswell for results showing up as supplemental, i know..missing/duplicate page title being one).

Now, what i suggest is that we implement some kind of "fail safe" for the older links we don't want to show up anylonger. Using a 301 Moved Permanently-header seems to be the proper way of doing it.

How...? I have no clue! Very Happy

I successfully made some 301's for my site, here's the result as an example:
1. I started out long time ago using the default News module in Nuke.
- result: links looking like
modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=123&mode=&order=0&thold=0
2. Began to use the NextGenMod
- result: links looking like
article123.html
article-123-thread-0-0.html
article--1-flat-0-123 (this one probably bc of a bug somewhere, doesn't matter now)
3. Began to use the NSNews
- result: links looking like
index.php?op=NEArticle&sid=123
4. Made the mod_rewrite work properly with the NSNews
-result: links looking like
news-article-123.html

Ok, i realize this mess in links are my own fault, but i think you guys understand where i'm heading.

Now my .htaccess looks like this:

Code:

RedirectMatch 301 /article-([0-9]*)-thread-0-0.html http://www.domain.com/news-article-$1.html
RedirectMatch 301 /article([0-9]*).html http://www.domain.com/news-article-$1.html
RedirectMatch 301 /article--1-flat-0-([0-9]*) http://www.domain.com/news-article-$1.html

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^op=NEArticle&sid=([0-9]+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/news-article-%1.html? [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^name=News&file=article&sid=([0-9]+)&mode=&order=0&thold=0$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^modules\.php$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/news-article-%1.html? [R=301,L]

RewriteRule ^news-article-([0-9]*).html modules.php?name=News&op=NEArticle&sid=$1 [L,NC]

Problem solved, any of the above links will redirect to the one link i want it to...except for
modules.php?name=News&op=NEArticle&sid=123
I haven't been able to redirect this one, and this seems to be the biggest problem (it's ofc no problem if the page was never seen by any search engine...but it was, and in many cases the same thing happens for you guys).

The result of all this work is that i won't be penalized in search engines for duplicate pages...which basically this is all about.

Well, im not sorry for writing down what i think, lol ...but i am sorry if i can't make myself clear enough to make all this making any sense. At least I hope some of it did!