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/xxxxx URLs to be redirected to /vehicles/xxxxx
• you want to redirect one or more URLs on your site to another site. For instance, redirects all https://blog.example.com/xxxxx URLs to https://www.example.com/blog/xxxx
• have more complex redirects needs, such as removing part of URL: from /vehicles/cars/xxxxx to /cars/xxxxx
• 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.