neighborhood url 301 redirect issues

[MarkZ]

Spent several hours trying to find the right answers... and testing codes.. Even used redirect plug ins...

Just switched example.com from Dreamweaver html site to a wordpress site to keep up with the Google mobile restrictions. I now need to create 301 redirects for individual pages, however the redirects are to a subdomain with pages generated automatically through an IDX provider (real estate).

For example I want to 301 redirect:

http://example.com/Neighborhood_Homes_for_Sale.html to http://search.example.com/i/neighborhood-city-name-state

using the htaccess file.

Your guidance in this matter is greatly appreciated.

Mark Z

[edited by: phranque at 10:05 pm (utc) on Apr 24, 2015]
[edit reason] Please Use example.com [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld, Mark!


you will need some way to associate the extracted neighborhood name with its city name and state.
it is possible to do this using one-to-one redirects of old urls to new urls.

RewriteRule ^Neighborhood1_Homes_for_Sale\.html$ http://search.example.com/i/neighborhood1-city1-name-state1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^Neighborhood2_Homes_for_Sale\.html$ http://search.example.com/i/neighborhood2-city2-name-state2 [R=301,L]
...

another possibility is to recognize the pattern of these urls and internally rewrite these to a script that responds with the proper redirect using a lookup table or database for the association while reconstructing the url.

RewriteRule ^([A-Z]\w+)_Homes_for_Sale\.html$ /redirect-script.php?neighborhood=$1 [L]

redirect-script.php would look up the value of the "neighborhood" parameter to retrieve the city name and state, construct a new url, and return the following response:

301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://search.example.com/i/neighborhood-city-name-state

[edited by: phranque at 10:01 pm (utc) on Apr 25, 2015]

[lucy24]

redirect-script.php?neighborhood=$1

... and when your fingers typed "redirect-script" your brain meant "/redirect-script" with leading / slash so no nasty robot can slip in and say All your RewriteBase are belong to us, or whatever it is that g1smd was always warning about ;)

When you rewrite to a php thingy, doesn't the server remember the originally requested URL? I thought it did, so you don't need to capture or pass any values.

MarkZ, another thing your hypothetical php script can do with the greatest of ease is to change everything from Title_Case or CamelCase to lower-case throughout. Doing it within htaccess, without the built-in RewriteMap, can be slightly hellish.

[thomcraver]

MarkZ:

I like to use a plugin called Redirection by John Godley. It makes things simple and easy and doesn't make you muc up your htaccess files.

If you're new to WordPress, it would be your easiest route. If you remove the wrong things from your htaccess file - or improperly order them - you could cause issues with WordPress functionality.

[phranque]

when your fingers typed "redirect-script" your brain meant "/redirect-script" with leading /

yes.
so edited.