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#2808 – Help with redirects.

Posted in ‘sh404SEF’

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Thursday, 06 October 2016 11:56 UTC

baz9969

Hi there,

I hope I find you well.

I'm wondering if you can help me, my old Joomla website had 430 redirects on it's htaccess file and I'm wondering if I should copy them over to the new htaccess or do all the 301 redirects through sh404sef? At the moment my htaccess is blank bar the rewrite element, and sh404sef has so far found 150 of the old URLs, and all in all there will be 500 URLs once my old to new website redirects have been factored in.

Is it best to add the old redirects to htaccess or wait for sh404sef to find all of them?

Also the old website was HTTP, the new website is HTTPS, and I would normally just redirect page to page in htaccess and all would be well, so if I do a sh404sef redirect will it automatically transfer from the old HTTP URL to the new HTTPS option?

Finally, in the 404 requests section of sh404sef, it is offering some URLs such as .well-known/assetlinks.json and administrator/components/com_admin/cacheplugin.php, should I redirect those to live pages or leave them as 404's.

Many thanks in advance, all the very best, Barry.

Thursday, 06 October 2016 13:00 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

1 - Not sure I fully understand what you are doing.

my old Joomla website had 430 redirects on it's htaccess file

You mean you had redirects from your old site, to new URL still on your old site, right?
So what does this has to do with the new site? maybe one example with real URL would help a lot.

Is it best to add the old redirects to htaccess or wait for sh404sef to find all of them?

sh404SEF does not find any URL or redirects. WHat happens is that if a URL is required to be displayed on page of your site (because a visitor or a search engine requested that page), then Joomla will pass that URL to sh404SEF, and this is when the URL is recorded into the database. Until then, requesting that URL will generate a 404.

2 -

Also the old website was HTTP, the new website is HTTPS, and I would normally just redirect page to page in htaccess and all would be well, so if I do a sh404sef redirect will it automatically transfer from the old HTTP URL to the new HTTPS option?

sh404SEF is not involved in the domain part of URLs. That's done by Joomla. There are settings in Joomla config to handle HTTPS redirects. As usual, doing those redirects is faster when done in .htaccess, so I would advise to do it in htaccess anyway.

3 -

Finally, in the 404 requests section of sh404sef, it is offering some URLs such as .well-known/assetlinks.json and administrator/components/com_admin/cacheplugin.php, should I redirect those to live pages or leave them as 404's.

You should do redirects when it's useful and serve a purpose. This happens when:

- an actual page has changed URL. So you have the more or less the same content, but simply you modified the URL. That will be useful to both users and search engines.
- a page has been removed, but you still want visitors to go to another page if they try to reach the removed one. Search engines will not use that (because the page content is different, they will not carry along old page ranking to the new one), but it can still be very useful to visitors.
Rgds

Thursday, 06 October 2016 13:37 UTC

baz9969

Hi there,

Ok, some background information. My previous website was hacked, but before it got hacked it had 430 redirects on the htaccess from previous versions of it going back many years, which also included a few chains unfortunately.

The website that was hacked was HTTP and had 65 live URLs on it, and these will need to be redirected to my new website which is now HTTPS and has 50 URLs on it, some with the old name but most are completely renamed for example:

Old: htttp://www.domain.com/how-to-build-a-car
New: https://www.domain.com/how-a-car-is-built

All in all if I add the vintage 301 redirects to the most recent 301 redirects I will have just under 500 redirects in total on the brand new website, and I need to know if I should put them all on the htaccess file like I have done in the past?

Now, if I understand you correctly, I need to put my redirects on the htaccess as I have done in the past, and then if sh404sef finds new 404's redirect those by adding them to the htaccess as well. At the moment I have not done any redirects of any kind, and so far sh404sef has found 150 or so 404 errors.

The reason I am using sh404sef is because I have a weird duplicate URL issue when using Featured Articles as an option in a menu. To give you an idea of what I mean, instead of have a URL such as https://www.domain.com/menu-name/article I'd have https://www.domain.com/menu-name/category/article, the category was obsolete and couldn't be fixed under normal avenues, so my developer recommended I use sh404sef to fix this issue. It only happens with featured articles, category blog is fine.

I hope that helps, regards, Barry.

Thursday, 06 October 2016 14:25 UTC

wb_weeblr

All in all if I add the vintage 301 redirects to the most recent 301 redirects I will have just under 500 redirects in total on the brand new website, and I need to know if I should put them all on the htaccess file like I have done in the past?

Yes, totally. Using .htaccess is much, much faster. Also note that Google advise to leave redirects in place for about a year, so maybe some of your redirects are simply not useful any longer?

and then if sh404sef finds new 404's redirect those by adding them to the htaccess as well.

As explained above, it is usually not useful to redirect 404s. You should redirect 404s only if it serves a purpose. Meaning the page has actually moved, as in your example from /how-to-build-a-car to /how-a-car-is-built

However, for instance

.well-known/assetlinks.json and administrator/components/com_admin/cacheplugin.php

are just random attacks at your site, and should in no way be redirected to anything.

and so far sh404sef has found 150 or so 404 errors.

so you need to sort them out and find out which one you want to redirect. Then do the redirect, either in sh404SEF (you have a redirect button) or in .htaccess. .htaccess is always faster and resource efficient, while sh404SEF is easier to use.

instead of have a URL such as https://www.domain.com/menu-name/article I'd have https://www.domain.com/menu-name/category/article, the category was obsolete and couldn't be fixed under normal avenues, so my developer recommended I use sh404sef to fix this issue. It only happens with featured articles, category blog is fine.

Just know that we never use menu item names to build URLs. Only categories, titles, etc

If your need is to mimic old URLs however, the easiest and faster way is to locate the "bad" URL in the URL manager, click on it and customize it to your liking.

Rgds

Thursday, 06 October 2016 14:32 UTC

baz9969

Hi again,

Many thanks for your help.

Should I delete the 150 or so 404s sh404sef has found before I re-add the redirects to my htaccess, I'm thinking that the list would then repopulate with a more accurate number of 404s?

Also, should I add only the 65 HTTP to 50 HTTPS most recent redirects to the htaccess and then let sh404sef find the others so I can route out which of the old redirects can be deleted? I don't want 500 redirects if some of them are obsolete or chained.

Many thanks, Baz.

Thursday, 06 October 2016 15:26 UTC

wb_weeblr

Should I delete the 150 or so 404s sh404sef has found before I re-add the redirects to my htaccess, I'm thinking that the list would then repopulate with a more accurate number of 404s?

Yes, that's totally OK

Also, should I add only the 65 HTTP to 50 HTTPS most recent redirects to the htaccess and then let sh404sef find the others

As said above, sh404SEF does not handle the domain or the sheme (http vs https). So nothing like this will be recorded.
If what you mean is that you have 65 HTTP URLs that are redirected to different HTTPS URLs, then you indeed must do some htaccess redirects.

Rgds

Thursday, 06 October 2016 15:29 UTC

baz9969

Hi again,
Many thanks for your help, you've been great.
All the best, Barry.

Thursday, 06 October 2016 16:09 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

You're welcome. Closing this ticket now, feel free to open a new one as needed. If you do so, please mention this ticket number in the new one.

If you created any superadmin account for us, be sure to delete or block it now to avoid unnecessary risk in the future.

Be sure to also check out wbAMP, our new Accelerated Mobiles pages plugin for Joomla - the next big thing is SEO, direct from Google themselves!

And please feel free to post a review on the JED,it helps and we appreciate it!

Rgds

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