Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Php 301 redirect
-
Hi
I am migrating an old wordpress site to a custom PHP site and the URL profiles will be different, so want to retain all link profiles and more importantly if a user visits the old urls via search then they are seamlessly transferred to the new equivalent page
For example
www.domain.com/about-us is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/aboutus.php
www.domain.com/furniture is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/furniture-collections.php
etc
What is the best way of achieving this apart from .htaccess as not 100% confident of doing this. Could it be done via PHP or using meta tags?
-
Hi, Not meta tags. If no other way, You should do it with PHP header() function.
<code>header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header("Location: /somelocation");</code>But you need to add some conditions to determine if the page should be redirected. For example to redirect /example.html to https://www.new-domain.com/example you need to write something like:
if (isset($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) && parse_url($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], PHP_URL_PATH) == '/example.html')
{header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');header('Location: https://www.new-domain.com/example');exit();}
It can be a lot of code, if you need to redirect many pages. In this case, You can try to use PHP 301 Redirect Generator - https://www.301-redirect.online/php-header-location-generator
-
OK - take this page: www.domain.com/about-us
Presuming that this is a php page, open it up in an editor and insert this code right at the top
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.domain.com/aboutus.php" );
?>and repeat this same procedure for any other files you need to redirect.
-
Hi
Thanks for the link, it mentions under php
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?>So how would I implement multiple page changes in the code above i.e.
www.domain.com/about-us is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/aboutus.php
www.domain.com/furniture is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/furniture-collections.php -
There are various ways of doing this and yes the good ol htaccess can be a bit daunting at first.
Check this page out, should help you.
http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.phpYou cannot do a 301 redirect with meta tags - a meta tag "refresh" does not provide a 301 redirect.
Useful hint: Before commiting to it, try using the same script either in PHP or HTACCESS but with a 302 (temporary redirect) - then test it works and then make it a 301 (permanent redirect) - that way if you get it wrong, Google will not take the permanent instruction.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
302 > 302 > 301 Redirect Chain Issue & Advice
Hi everyone, I recently relaunched our website and everything went well. However, while checking site health, I found a new redirect chain issue (302 > 302 > 301 > 200) when the user requests the HTTP and non-www version of our URL. Here's what's happening: • 302 #1 -- http://domain.com/example/ 302 redirects to http://domain.com/PnVKV/example/ (the 5 characters in the appended "subfolder" are dynamic and change each time)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew_In_Search_of_Answers
• 302 #2 -- http://domain.com/PnVKV/example/ 302 redirects BACK to http://domain.com/example/
• 301 #1 -- http://domain.com/example/ 301 redirects to https://www.domain.com/example/ (as it should have done originally)
• 200 -- https://www.domain.com/example/ resolves properly We're hosted on AWS, and one of my cloud architects investigated and reported GoDaddy was causing the two 302s. That's backed up online by posts like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46307518/random-5-alpha-character-path-appended-to-requests and https://www.godaddy.com/community/Managing-Domains/My-domain-name-not-resolving-correctly-6-random-characters-are/td-p/60782. I reached out to GoDaddy today, expecting them to say it wasn't a problem on their end, but they actually confirmed this was a known bug (as of September 2017) but there is no timeline for a fix. I asked the first rep I spoke with on the phone to send a summary, and here's what he provided in his own words: From the information gathered on my end and I was able to get from our advanced tech support team, the redirect issue is in a bug report and many examples have been logged with the help of customers, but no log will be made in this case due to the destination URL being met. Most issues being logged are site not resolving properly or resolving errors. I realize the redirect can cause SEO issues with the additional redirects occurring. Also no ETA has been logged for the issue being reported. I do feel for you since I now understand more the SEO issues it can cause. I myself will keep an eye out for the bug report and see if any progress is being made any info outside of this I will email you directly. Thanks. Issue being Experienced: Domains that are set to Go Daddy forwarding IPs may sometimes resolve to a url that has extra characters appended to the end of them. Example: domain1.com forwards to http://www.domain2.com/TLYEZ. However it should just forward to http://www.domain2.com. I think this answers what some Moz users may have been experiencing sporadically, especially this previous thread: https://azwa.1clkaccess.in/community/q/forwarded-vanity-domains-suddenly-resolving-to-404-with-appended-url-s-ending-in-random-5-characters. My question: Given everything stated above and what we know about the impact of redirect chains on SEO, how severe should I rate this? I told my Director that I would recommend we move away from GoDaddy (something I don't want to do, but feel we _**have **_to do), but she viewed it as just another technical SEO issue and one that didn't necessarily need to be prioritized over others related to the relaunch. How would you respond in my shoes? On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the biggest), how big of a technical SEO is this? Would you make it a priority? At the very least, I thought the Moz community would benefit from the GoDaddy confirmation of this issue and knowing about the lack of an ETA on a fix. Thanks!0 -
Switching from HTTP to HTTPS: 301 redirect or keep both & rel canonical?
Hey Mozzers, I'll be moving several sites from HTTP to HTTPS in the coming weeks (same brand, multiple ccTLDs). We'll start on a low traffic site and test it for 2-4 weeks to see the impact before rolling out across all 8 sites. Ideally, I'd like to simply 301 redirect the HTTP version page to the HTTPS version of the page (to get that potential SEO rankings boost). However, I'm concerned about the potential drop in rankings, links and traffic. I'm thinking of alternative ways and so instead of the 301 redirect approach, I would keep both sites live and accessible, and then add rel canonical on the HTTPS pages to point towards HTTP so that Google keeps the current pages/ links/ indexed as they are today (in this case, HTTPS is more UX than for SEO). Has anyone tried the rel canonical approach, and if so, what were the results? Do you recommend it? Also, for those who have implemented HTTPS, how long did it take for Google to index those pages over the older HTTP pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steven_Macdonald0 -
Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?
We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget). A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url. I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site. We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK7170 -
301 Redirect of subdomain?
Fellow Mozzers, I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around a redirect issue and thought it was worth posing the question to the Moz community. I did a search first but couldn't find the exact answer I was looking for. How does a 301 redirect work when you redirect a sub domain example.homepage.com to www.homepage.com but you keep the sub directories of example.homepage.com/page-1 active and are trying to rank them? I'm dealing with a current project where this is happening and this doesn't make sense to me, to redirect the subdomain if you're also trying to rank/create search traffic for pages, sub directories on example.homepage.com. This also get's into the debate of if a sub domain site is viewed as it's own website and therefore has to rank itself. If this is true, it seems like we're kind of killing the authority of the site by redirecting it. Additionally, www.homepage.com has a much stronger link profile than example.homepage.com I hope this makes sense. Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMG-Texas0 -
Redirect at Registrar or Server
Hi folks, I have run into a situation were a new client has 3 TLDs (e.g. mycompany.com, mycompany.org and mycompany.biz), all with the same content. They are on a Windows IIS environment, which I am not familiar with. Until now, all of my clients have been Linux/Apache environment, so I always dealt with these issues utilizing htaccess. Currently all resolve to the same IP, but the URL remains the same in the browser address field (e.g. if you type-in mycompany.org - it remains as such). We want the .org and .biz version to 301 Redirect to the .com TLD. I am wondering what the best practice might be in this situation? Could we simply redirect at the registrar level or would implementation at the server level be best? If so, I would really appreciate an example from someone with experience implementing redirects on IIS. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0 -
Can I make 301 redirects on a Windows server (without access to IIS)?
Hey everyone, I've been trying to figure out a way to set up some 301 redirects to handle the broken links left behind after a site restructuring, but I can only ever find information on 2 methods that I can't use (as far as I can tell). The first method is to do some stuff with an htaccess file, but that looks like it only works on Linux-based servers. The method described for Windows servers is generally to install this IIS rewrite/redirect module and run that, but I don't think our web hosting company allows users to log directly into the server, so I wouldn't be able to use the IIS thing. Is there any other way to get a 301 redirect set up? And is this uncommon for a web hosting company to do, or do you all just run your sites on Linux-based servers or your own Windows machines? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrianAlpert780 -
301 doesn't redirect a page that ends in %20, and others being appended with ?q=
I have a product page that ends /product-name**%20** that I'm trying to redirect in this way: Redirect 301 /products/product-name%20 http://www.site.com/products/product-name And it doesn't redirect at all. The others, those with %20, are being redirected to a url hybrid of old and new: http://www.site.com/products/product-name**?q=old-url** I'm using Drupal CMS, and it may be creating rules that counter my entries.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brocberry0 -
Is 301 redirect suggested on pagination pages
Hi - Due to pagination the default page of site is coming in 2 url with - ?page=1/ sub-url and /sub-url is 301 a recommended solution due to this pagination urls Also - is it required to create separate title and meta description of every pagination page We are taking specifically in context of our discounts and offer section http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_offers&view=list&Itemid=9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0