Set up 301 redirects
Preamble
The ability to perform redirects from one URL on your site to another is a major tool when maintaining your site and trying to preserve or improve your rankings. sh404SEF provides an easy way to redirect one or more pages to a new address, without the need to modify your web server configuration but directly in the Joomla! administration instead.
In sh404SEF terminology, a 301 redirect is called an alias
. Setting up /the-old-address.html as an alias of /the-new-address will cause sh404SEF to trigger a 301 redirect to /the-new-address whenever a request is made for the /the-old-address.html page.
redirecting a page to another one only has an SEO value if the new page has similar content
Don't expect ranking and trust to be passed over to a new page simply because you are redirecting to it from another, well ranked and trusted page, if the two pages are not similar.
There are 2 types of aliases you can set: the simpler ones are one-to-one redirects, as we mentioned above. But sh404SEF also lets you create much more powerful alias "rules", to redirect groups of URLs to groups of other URLs, essentially removing the need to create complicated code in your .htaccess files for that. How to create such redirects is covered in more details on the next two pages.
How to setup a simple, one-to-one alias
Simple aliases are:
- from one single URL to one other single URL
- only to and from your site
Please see next page for how to create and manage such redirects.
How to setup advanced aliases
Advanced aliases can actually be put to work very simply. They are useful in the following situations:
- you need to redirect multiple pages at the same time. For instance, you changed the name of a category, and you want all
/cars/[redacted]x
URLs to be redirected to/vehicles/[redacted]x
- you want to redirect one or more URLs on your site to another site. For instance, redirects all
https://blog.example.com/[redacted]x
URLs tohttps://www.example.com/blog/[redacted]
- have more complex redirects needs, such as removing part of URL: from
/vehicles/cars/[redacted]x
to/cars/[redacted]x
- you do not want to redirect some URLs, but instead keep them but add a
rel=canonical
link so that search engines know they should consider the main URL instead.
All these cases and more can be very easily handled with sh404SEF advanced aliases.
Please see this page for how to create and manage such redirects.
Usage information
By enabling the Alias usage
option in the Data recording
section of sh404SEF configuration, you can get detailed information about how the aliases (redirects) you create are used. Please see the Data recording pages for more details.