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1. Mezloh
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   I am just trying to cover all bases here before uploading a complete redesign of my friends site.

   I took over my friends site because his past web master was a complete noob and he structured his blog completely backwards. I have to say it was the worst blog i have ever seen.

   He didn't know how to use the categories and tags in wordpress.

   He created 150 categories using keywords which should have been used as tags for each post. So what he ended up with was 50 posts each added to 150 categories with no tags in any of them.

   Obviously he had no clue how to blog.

   I had to completely wipe out the previous category structure and now will be re-posting each post into a new category structure and tagging each post correctly.

   And the pages of the site were in complete disarray also.

   So to make a long story short, short story long, I completely redesigned my friends site on my localhost and I am ready to upload it to the server.

   My main concern is redirecting all of the links out there in the search engines, etc.

   It will pretty much be a completely new site built the right way and I want to preserve as much incoming traffic as possible with minimal 404 no content found errors.

   which plugin would be the most effective to accomplish this, or what should I add to the htaccess file to make this mess less of one.

   I hope that explains my dilema.

2. James
   Happiness Engineer
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Stick with using permanent redirects in the .htaccess file. There are plugins out there for this, but since this is a one-time deal it would be better to stick with the simple .htaccess rules for two reasons:

   1. It's easier to keep track of. Everything will be in one .htaccess file.

   2. Less overhead. A plugin would have to dynamically generate the redirects whenever the blog is visited.

3. Mezloh
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   macmanx

   Just to be clear would what exactly would I add in my htaccess file that will automatically redirect everything to the index page in case of a 404 error.

   Or
   can you recommend a decent plugin that will work or one that you have used successfully in the past. There is so many plugins out there and I don't want to use something that is going to create more problems.

   Thanks for responding, for a minute there I thought my post was going to get buried and be an orphan.

   Right now in my htaccess I just have the rewrite rules for permalinks

4. James
   Happiness Engineer
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Just to be clear would what exactly would I add in my htaccess file that will automatically redirect everything to the index page in case of a 404 error.

   Sorry, I thought you were planning to redirect the old pages to the new pages. In this case, try something like this:

   ErrorDocument 404 /

   If that doesn't work, you might want to try this:

   http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/smart-404/

5. Mezloh
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   I would have done it that way but the blog was so jacked up I basically had to reconfigure everything.

   There was no thought put into anything at all, no keyword research, no tags. Each post was added to every category.(about 150 categories in all)

   I wanted to start from scratch but I preserved as much as I could.

   Now I will drip feed the re-posts fully optimized the correct way. But for all the inbound links that are out the in the SERPs and social sites I want to make sure they at least go to the index page and not chase visitors away with 404 errors.

6. Mezloh
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   BTW that plugin looks like it will work perfectly, especially after I optimize and repost everything.

   The previous wanna be webmaster had no clue about WordPress or SEO and I think I will be able to cover for his inexperience very easily with this.

   Thanks for the recommendation of this plugin!!!

7. James
   Happiness Engineer
   Posted 1 year ago #

   You're welcome!

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