[thelist] Need suggestions on site redirection.

Joe Crawford jcrawford at avencom.com
Thu Apr 12 17:35:20 CDT 2001


Stéphane Gosselin" <stef at cfusions.com> wrote:
> Hi friends. Enjoying the list a lot, even thought myself up a tip in
> gratitude to whatever suggestions may abound.
> 
> Ok. I have a customer with a peculiar prob.. wich is now MY prob. May I
> share? hehe
> 
> Yeah. The site in question has over 100 indexed keywords, quite a few of
> them have good listings too exept.....all the links on the search engine
> points to pages that don t exist anymore. Now. The links are quite easy to
> pick out, I should have no trouble screening them with the linkcheck
> reports I have, BUT. The solution to a quickfix? I don t want to make a
> 'fake' web-page for each link with a redirect in each one.
> I'd like a more professional solution. Basically, anyone know of a one ( or
> few) file solution, easy to maintain, as gatewaypages will be added to the
> site to correct this at long term. We have access to all the basic (
> open-source) tools, php mysql, linux. Java - perl cgi or SSI.
> Is there anything that can redirect those urls BEFORE the server gives out
> a 404? Thanks.

You can do it with .htaccess style redirects - in fact that was what it was
born to do.

For example - I used to have a resume.html file, then a "resume" directory,
but now I don't - I have a /cv/ direcrtory.

My solution is this: a .htaccess file with:

Redirect /resume http://www.artlung.com/cv/
Redirect /resume.html http://www.artlung.com/cv/
Redirect /resume  http://www.artlung.com/cv/
Redirect /resume/  http://www.artlung.com/cv/

In this way, I account for the old URLs.

This is also a slick solution when someone mails out a bum URL in an
important mailing. On WebSanDiego.org --  the person who organized our Happy
Hour #7 sent out a mailing to how-many-hundred people with:

http://www.websandiego.org/happyhour/HappyHour7

and the URL was supposed to be lowercase. So they got a 404. Nice.

So I added:
<...this is one line>
Redirect /happyhour/HappyHour7
http://www.websandiego.org/happyhour/happyhour7
<...that was one line>
- and those old dumb bad URLS are now good URLs.

HTH,
    Joe
--
Joe Crawford ||||||||||||||       mailto:jcrawford at avencom.com
||||||||||||||||||||||||             http://www.avencom.com
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||      Avencom: Set Your Sites Higher







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