WordPress.org

1. dmiyares
   Member
   Posted 3 months ago #

   Hi:

   Hoping someone with better knowledge of mod_rewrite will find this question simple. I've taken over duties of a website for a company and am trying to do some SEO on it. The permalink structure was
   %year%/%month%/%post_id%/%category%/%postname%
   when I took control and I've changed it to simply %postname%. Everything on the site works fine, however, Google has over 1000 links point to the old urls
   http://www.example.com/2011/10/7639/cateogry/post_name/
   which throw 404 errors. I've tried a couple of plugins to fix the problem but they didn't work so I'm trying to learn my way around mod_rewrite to fix this.

   I've tried (and I've not optimized the regex just so I can read it better)
   ^/([0-9])([0-9])([0-9])([0-9])/([0-9])([0-9])/([0-9])([0-9])([0-9])([0-9])/(.*?)/(.*?) /$5 [L]

   However, this still hits a 404 page.

   Any pointers would be great ... thanks!

2. Jan Dembowski
   Volunteer Mod. & Brute Squad
   Posted 3 months ago #

   I would have thought canonical URLs would have taken care of that, but you're getting 404s back so it's not.

   If I understand it correctly, you want this

   http://www.example.com/2011/10/7639/cateogry/post_name/

   to become just this

   http://www.example.com/post_name/

   Or put differently

   http://www.example.com/$1/$2/$3/$4/$5/

   becomes

   http://www.example.com/$5/

   If so, try this above your WordPress rules in .htaccess

   # Old URLs to new
   <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /
   Rewriterule ^(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/ http://your-blog-url/$5/ [L]
   </IfModule>
   
   # BEGIN WordPress

   See if that works for you.

3. Jan Dembowski
   Volunteer Mod. & Brute Squad
   Posted 3 months ago #

   I forgot this part, if that does work put the response code 301 into that rewrite rule like so

   Rewriterule ^(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/ http://your-blog-url/$5/ [R=301,L]

   That will tell the search engines that the URLs are permanently moved to the new location.

4. Ipstenu
   Half-Elf Support Rogue & Mod
   Posted 3 months ago #

   http://www.example.com/2011/10/7639/category/post_name/ would be easier if you locked down the YYYY/MM slugs first...

   My first shot would be this:

   RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/(.*)/category/(.*)$ http://domain.com/$4 [L,R=301]

5. Jan Dembowski
   Volunteer Mod. & Brute Squad
   Posted 3 months ago #

   Okay, after a sidebar conversation, this seems to be it:

   # Old URLs to new
   <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9].*)/(.*)/(.*)$ http://your-blog-url/$4/ [L,R=301]
   </IfModule>
   
   # BEGIN WordPress

   The original one I posted breaks things like the visual editor. This one is more specific with the ####/##/numbers-here/category/slug pattern.

6. dmiyares
   Member
   Posted 3 months ago #

   Very cool.. thanks everyone... :)

7. cmegown
   Member
   Posted 3 months ago #

   I couldn't tell you an exact name, but I'm 99% sure there is a plugin for that. "Redirection" comes to mind, but I didn't go off and research it.

   I assume there is a plugin for it because you aren't exactly the first person to ever change their permalink structure after a large post base has been built, so I would make sure to do some research on that.

Reply

You must log in to post.