301ing Articles

[rj]

I have a political blog with a helper who put up a lot of Bizarre and odd articles that don't fit but get constant good traffic. I spun off a new blog to see if we can cash in on that theme.

I want to 301 the dozen or so articles that get that daily traffic on the old blog to the new blog.

First, is their anything I am missing or should know about this idea.

Secondly, does it work the same for images. Some are evergreen to images rather than articles.

And thirdly, could someone 301 code this one for me so I don't mess it up.

From
http://rackjite.com/archives/807-Bare-B ... -1000.html

To
http://www.funebrity.com/archives/6-Lua ... asts!.html

[judebert]

Hey, rj.

As a programmer, you'd think I'd be able to understand Google's ranking code. But I don't. So I'm not the guy to go to on SEO issues. What I've gleaned off the Net is that redirecting with a 301 is exactly the correct thing to do.

I do appear to be the resident regexp expert, and RewriteRules use regexp, so I'm probably the closest thing you'll find to help on this forum. You might want to check out a webmaster or Apache forum instead, though.

I believe what you need is:

Code: Select all

RewriteRule archives/807-.*\.html http://www.funebrity.com/archives/6-Luana-blah-blah [R=301,L]

(Replace blah-blah with the rest of the actual URL; I'm too lazy to expand the thing that far.)

Two problems come to mind: the exclamation point is not valid in URLs. You'll want to remove it. Additionally, Serendipity pays attention to the IDs, but largely ignores the title in any URL. This redirect code accounts for that, but therefore multiple URLs will all point to the same page. I hear that's a problem for PageRank.

[rj]

Thanx thats what I needed. Funny you should mention the exclamation point. This morning I got the diggers going good on an article, then comments about the link not working. I had 50% in the title. Then as I found my mistake too late, I changed it to PERCENT but added w/video!! Made the same mistake twice in a row! Messed up my day! And I know better too,I just was day dreaming or something.

I understand the code just by looking at it! I am progressing! I am not clear about what you mean with mulitple urls going to the same place.

The dozen or so articles I want to 301 are all separate articles each going to another specific article, never the same ones. Do I misunderstand?

thanx again...

RJ

BTW, it was your avatar that got me to make my own too!

[judebert]

I understand the code just by looking at it! I am progressing! I am not clear about what you mean with mulitple urls going to the same place.

"801-.*\.html" will match 801-actual_title.html, 801-another-title.html, and 801-anything.html. All three "valid" URLs will be redirected to the same page. This, I believe, is good, because they're all getting REDIRECTED.

However, there is a Serendipity problem, because any URL starting with a valid ID displays the correct page. So 6-Luana.html, 6-ha-ha.html, and 6-anything.html all show the same page. But they don't get redirected. They're multiple valid names for the same page, and I don't think Google likes that. There was some discussion once on how to solve it, but I don't remember how it worked out.

BTW, it was your avatar that got me to make my own too! :)

It reminds me of a comic I used to read, with a hedgehog or porcupine or something. Did you base it off of a comic, or did you come up with it entirely on your own?

[rj]

The drawing is a Snube! Line art I created back when for my great epic poem styled after Dr Suess, THE CUBE OF SHALUBE! Its good, try it! well unless you are a Fluboobian anyway...
http://rackjite.com/web/cube_of_shalube.htm

Dummy to programmer! I guess I dont understand how there could be other stuff that begin with 801. Not that many pages or categories... Are you kind of saying to be on the safe side I should maybe use the hard URL for it instead? Or do you mean like if I had changed the title a few times and there are different like versions of the same article?

My SEO issue now is should I begin pushing traffic to the new blog while its still not indexed, or wait a month until it gets indexed and gets that initial PR 0.

[judebert]

Dummy to user! Nothing else begins with 801, but someone trying to type in your URL could access it that way. You could make that mistake, and then Google would index it. Somebody else could make that mistake on his blog, and Google would index that, too. Annoying, but we haven't figured out a way around it (that I'm aware of).

And therefore, of course, you should NOT use the hard URL: you can't tell how someone's going to access it, so that rule should redirect everything. That's GOOD for SEO: it's an actual 301, so Google knows it's just an 'old' name for a single page.

The possible problem occurs on the other end, really. Invalid links -- starting with "archives/6-" but not including the correct title -- will display the correct page without a redirect. That's multiple pages with identical content, which Google doesn't like.

If everything goes correctly, this won't be a problem, because nobody will link improperly. If somebody does mess up, we still haven't figured out what to do about it.

SEO: don't know. Sorry. We did have a guy here who was knowledgeable in SEO, but it wasn't me.