301 for 55000 pages

[dirkfreak]

Hi There,

I have 50000 url that need a 301 Permanent move

Example:

mydomain.com/cheats/somedir/123.htm

to

mydomain.com/cheats/somedir/sometext.htm

I know to set a .htaccess redirect but I can't set 50000 redirect in my htaccess file..

What is the best thing I can do ?

I hope someone can help me

[g1smd]

Set up a rewrite to internally rewrite the incoming URL requests to a single PHP file that then looks up the correct URL and issues the 301 status header and the new location header.

How the script looks the new URL is up to you. It depends on the both the old and new site's URL structure. One way is to have a table of old and new URLs held in a database.

[jdMorgan]

Posted after a four hour ISP outage, so somewhat redundant:

The best thing you could do is to NOT change your URLs. Any benefit from text-in-URL is going to be small, and by redirecting this many URLs, you may be setting yourself up for an extended period of reduced ranking because of search engines' loss of "trust" in the stability of your site; It can take some time (weeks to months) for search engines to completely re-index your site and update their link-graphs, returning your pages' rankings to where they were before (or at least close).

Second best would be to put a rule in /cheats/.htaccess (or in a <Directory /cheats> container in httpd.conf or other config file) to internally rewrite all requested URL-paths of the form /<somedir>/<number>.htm to a small script that can look up the "text URL" in a database using the <number> in the requested URL-path, and then generate a 301-Moved Permanently redirect to the proper new URL.

Example rule in /cheats/.htaccess:

RewriteRule ^([^/]+/[0-9]+\.htm)$ /path-to-your-cgi-dir/url-lookup-script.pl?old-path=$1 [L]

BTW, I recommend that you use "example.com/cheats/somedir/sometext" as the new URL. There is no reason to add ".htm" to the end of that URL. Also, very carefully pick the words for "somedir" and "sometext" and use a very restricted character-set to avoid URL-encoding so that you will never have to change these URLs again. Never. [w3.org]

Jim

[true_INFP]

Any benefit from text-in-URL is going to be small

I disagree.

[dirkfreak]

Thanks jdMorgan ;-)

[dirkfreak]

I know you told me never change your urls, but on the other hand we are pushed to change them because others tells us that kewords in url gives you higher positions in search results.

So after one night sleep I dicide to change my urls..When I look two days later, google gives high position to most of our new urls with allot of traffic..

But two days later we lost 60% of all our traffic and most pages are not in the google search results or are back on page 30 or higher.. Also new added pages for those directories without any 301 are not showing up in there search results..

I use a http status header checker to make sure I did a good 301...

It lookslike we last all rankings on those pages!

Is this normale after a 301 ? And how long will it takes before we are back on normale postions?

Help

[jdMorgan]

Three days to nine months, depending on what the previous rankings were and how often the pages get crawled.

Making any additional changes to try to 'recover' will only re-start the clock, so do not do anything -- at least not for several weeks. Look for signs that the highest-ranked pages are starting to return to the index during this time. If after several weeks, they do not appear to be recovering, then you may wish to consider taking further action (see below).

Any changes which do not benefit your visitors should be very, very carefully weighed against the risk of lost ranking. It is far better to put "SEO-friendly" URLs in place on a new site that to try to change your URLs later. And it is far better to change only a few at a time than to try to change all of them at once.

That said, what is going on here is that by changing all URLs, you have massively changed the link-graph of your site. For each URL that you changed, you also changed the URLs of all or many of the pages that link to that URL. So for now, none of the changed URLs have any valid inbound links, and so they suffer in ranking.

However, there is likely no "penalty" involved here. It is just a matter of having all-new URLs with no recorded inbound links. You must allow time for Googlebot to re-index all these old pages with their new URLs and completely rebuild the link-graph.

So again -- be patient, change nothing, and look for signs of recovery of the 'top-ranked pages.' If after several weeks no improvement is noted, post in the Google forum and ask questions before making any further changes!

Jim

[g1smd]

For a site changed in January, Google still hasn't picked up all changed internal links nor actioned many of the redirects.

In WebmasterTools there's still data from last November lurking.

Traffic has mostly recovered, but it took at least three months.

[dirkfreak]

Thanks Jim for this extra info..

One thing if I use a .htaccess in the cheats directory and use a Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
for those links..

Can I delete then all old url files ?

[jdMorgan]

Yes, but of course it would be best to test with one or only a few deleted files first, to make sure that some other config change doesn't still need to be made.

Jim

[dirkfreak]

Thanks Jim for all your time...