Google friendly redirects of many URLs.

mod_rewrite is hard, mod_rewrite from a DB harder.

[killroy]

I have a directory site that ahs a large number of categories. I am in the process of creatign a super site that inclodes that database and many more.

To kick start it I linked to some of its pages like this:

oldsite/cat1/subcat1 -> newsite/oldsitecountry/cat1/subcat1
oldsite/cat2/subcat2 -> newsite/oldsitecountry/cat2/subcat2

well enough, only I made a mistace to link from a city index as well. I removed it within hours but google had already picked up many of hte links. They went like this:

oldsite/city1/cat1/subcat1 -> newsite/oldsitecountry/city1/cat1/subcat1
oldsite/city2/cat2/subcat2 -> newsite/oldsitecountry/city2/cat2/subcat2

To prevent the pages to show garbage I have temporarily doen met refreshes from
newsite/oldsitecountry/city1/cat1/subcat1
to
newsite/oldsitecountry/cat1/subcat1

now I'd like to take city1 through cityxxxx fomr a database and do a mod_rewrite for these URLs, a 301 for a month and then remove it again to put google back on its track and avoid any penalisations for bad 404 links.

How would that work?

S. N.

[Brett_Tabke]

Ya, 301 is your best best bet. Make sure to double check your server headers to see that indeed you are kicking out the 301.

[killroy]

The problem is, I don't really want to add 200-800 redirects in my config files. Isn't there a better way? I could easily do it form withinthe script, but I don'T know how to spit out the 301, i.e. how to do an unparsed header exec on Apache.

SN

[speda1]

You could do it with mod rewrite. You might have to tweak it a bit.

RewriteRule /(.*) [newsite.com...] [R=301,L]

[jdMorgan]

killroy,

From what you've posted, I couldn't figure out what you need to accomplish with 200-800 rewrites. But, just as an example of how to do multiple redirects with one RewriteRule, here's a rule to replace your meta-refreshes, described as:

newsite/oldsitecountry/city1/cat1/subcat1
to
newsite/oldsitecountry/cat1/subcat1

RewriteRule ^/newsite/oldsitecountry/city1/([^/]*)/(.*) /newsite/oldsitecountry/$1/$2 [R=301,L]

As shown, it's for use in httpd.conf. For .htaccess use, change "^/newsite" to "^newsite".

More info: Introduction to mod_rewrite [webmasterworld.com]

HTH,
Jim