#5836 – Starting a new site with sh404SEF

Hi,

Once I have finished the new website (currently a host website)?

I'm not sure what you mean by " host website" to be honest. It would be easier if you provide actual and full URLs of what you are talking about, both old and new site and examples of URLs that won't exist on the new site.

I'll assume that you are developing the new site in a "hidden" place and then you'll transfer the site using Akeeba backup or similar to overwrite the old, existing site. And what you say is that the existing site may have URLs that will not be in the new site?

If so, that's a common situation and it needs to be handled if you do not want to lose ranking with search engines.

what will happen if any one tries to reach an old URL

A 404 page should be displayed. This is the recommended way to properly handle URLs that don't exist anymore - but please read on, there are exceptions.

Or will it just redirect to the home page

We would never do that and you should never do that under any circumstances. That's a big SEO mistake because it prevents search engines to update their index, or at least slows them down a lot.

Will the 'useful 404 error page' see that they were trying to reach a page no longer there and redirect to a new page with a similar URL

If you display a 404, you don't redirect. Our (useful!) 404 error page is a real error page that returns a 404 status code. It shows to the lost visitor suggested similar URLs but it's up to them to click on the links.

We do have an option to automatically redirect to the 1st suggested similar URL but I'd recommend against that, it's a bad experience for the user in most cases and the URL selection process is not bullet-proof so you might end up sending them to the wrong page.

So what you should do in such case is:

- list the URLs on the old site
- list the URLs on the new site
- If some pages do not exist anymore (I mean the content, not only the URL), then leave it like that: a 404 should happen and there should not be any redirect
- if some pages simply have "moved", ie the content is basically the same but the URL is different that's the exception I was talking about earlier. For those pages, you have 2 options in sh404SEF:

1 - Customize the URL manually so that the new URL is actually exactly the same as the old URL: you removed the problem entirely
2 - Set up a redirect from the old to the new URL. You can do that easily inside of sh404SEF. You can set up "one to one" redirects (ie from /old-url to /new-url) or "generic" redirects (ie /old-category/xxxx to /new-category/xxxx).

If your site is large, one thing you can do is list all URLs but then sort them traffic and only check your top 100 or so URLs, the ones that bring in the most visitors today. Set up redirects or customize those ones and then you can do the rest later or rely on sh404SEF displaying similar links for the others.

Hope this helps. Again, always better to describe your question with real and full URLs, easier to discuss about.

Best regards

HI

Yes, the 3 steps workflow is correct. You actually do not need to Purge URLs if sh404SEF was not enabled before. The database will be empty when sh404SEF is enabled for the 1st time. URLs will be created and stored in the database when you or users visit the site.

When you or a visitor requests a page (for instance your homepage), Joomla needs to build the content of that page. This includes all the links (for instance menus, footer links, links inside articles) and so when Joomla builds the page to respond to the visitor request, it asks sh404SEF to create all those links. That's when the URLs are stored into the database. When someone visit a page of your site, all the links on that page are built and stored.
This is a one-off process: next time that page is visited again, all links have already been built and they are just read from the database.

Two consequences of this:

1 - If you change settings related to URL structure, for instance initially you decided to have categories in articles URL but later you decide to have only article title in the URL, you need to purge URLs so that new ones can be rebuilt using those new settings.
2 - After the site has been released, you are not supposed to Purge URLs anymore. This may cause 404 to visitors until all the URLs are rebuilt again. The only exception is again if you decide to change URL structure settings for instance.

Best regards