Embarrassing 301 redirection question

[Chips Ahoy McCoy]

Hi there,

We are migrating our site from a SAAS to Wordpress. Our domain name will stay the same but our URL structure will change and we will obviously have to change web hosts as well.

I'm unsure of how to handle the 301 redirects. This is probably a really stupid question but are you supposed to create the .htaccess with the 301 redirect rules and put it on the old server or the new one? The SAAS won't give you access to their hosting platform so will it work if we setup the redirects on our new server?

I think we will have around 1,500 pages that need to be redirected. Is using a WP plugin such as simple 301 redirects out of the question? Just stick to mod_rewrite?

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld, Chips Ahoy McCoy!


when you move to the "Wordpress" platform, you will change your DNS configuration to point your domain to the new web server.
you will configure the new server to accept and redirect any requests for the 1500 legacy pages.

[Chips Ahoy McCoy]

Thank you for that answer phranque!

Some of the content on our site will change but a lot of it will be the same, such as all of the blog posts. When these are migrated over to WordPress would it be advisable to use canonicals on the blogs posts so the legacy pages don't run the risk of turning up duplicate content?

[lucy24]

Edit: Oops, I overlapped. This is a reply to the original question.

If you were changing domain names (whether or not anything changes in physical hosting), you would have to attach the redirects to the old name. Since it's the same name, all requests will end up in the same place.

we will obviously have to change web hosts as well

It's only obvious if you know who the host is. (You're probably not allowed to say.) Are you migrating from the last host on the planet that doesn't support WP?

The important thing is to put all the redirects in the right place, physically. WP uses mod_rewrite, so make sure everything happens within the same htaccess file. Will the WP installation be in a subdirectory or will it cover the whole domain? If it's a subdirectory, is it a new subdirectory that didn't exist before? Here I'm talking about /directories/ in the URL, not necessarily about physical location of the files.

When these are migrated over to WordPress would it be advisable to use canonicals on the blogs posts so the legacy pages don't run the risk of turning up duplicate content?

There are a couple of recent threads on the canonical vs. 301 question. Short answer: "canonical" is generally only needed if for some reason it's impossible to redirect everyone to the same URL. If you can redirect, do so. There may be plugins to do exactly what you need; see the Content Management subforum.

Matter of fact, phranque, is this the best forum for the question? Not that I actually have any idea what "Website Technology" is supposed to be for :(

[Chips Ahoy McCoy]

It's only obvious if you know who the host is. (You're probably not allowed to say.) Are you migrating from the last host on the planet that doesn't support WP?

The important thing is to put all the redirects in the right place, physically. WP uses mod_rewrite, so make sure everything happens within the same htaccess file. Will the WP installation be in a subdirectory or will it cover the whole domain? If it's a subdirectory, is it a new subdirectory that didn't exist before? Here I'm talking about /directories/ in the URL, not necessarily about physical location of the files.

We are currently on a SAAS platform and don't have any access to the hosting itself. With the WP migration we are moving to a host that specifically specializes in WP hosting.

The WP installation will cover the whole domain. Some of the URL structure we can keep in tact but the majority of it we cannot. For our blog posts for example the current structure looks like: /blog/bid/101281/title-of-post (that might give away the SAAS) and we will change it to /blog/title-of-post

[phranque]

When these are migrated over to WordPress would it be advisable to use canonicals on the blogs posts so the legacy pages don't run the risk of turning up duplicate content?

by "legacy pages", you really mean "legacy urls".
when these legacy urls are crawled and the response is a 301 to the new location, the legacy url should drop out of the index.