htaccess redirect – hundreds of posts – SEO

It’d be fairly easy for you to re-write from

http://www.website.com/product/sony-tv-42-inch

to

http://www.website.com/product/sony-tv-42-inch

but that extra / is going to present a problem.

As mentioned by some others you certainly want a 301 for SEO purposes, so here is what I would do.

Step 1 – Get current URLS:

Get a list of all current post permalinks. This SQL query for MySQL by David George should do the trick.

   SELECT  wpp.post_title,
        wpp.guid,
        wpp.post_date,
        CONCAT
        (
          wpo_su.option_value,
          REPLACE
          (
            REPLACE
            (
              REPLACE
              (
                REPLACE
                (
                  wpo.option_value, 
                  '%year%',
                  date_format(wpp.post_date,'%Y')
                ),
                '%monthnum%',
                date_format(wpp.post_date, '%m')
              ),
              '%day%',
              date_format(wpp.post_date, '%d')
            ),
            '%postname%', 
            wpp.post_name
          )
        ) AS permalink
  FROM wp_posts wpp
  JOIN wp_options wpo
    ON wpo.option_name = 'permalink_structure'
   AND wpo.blog_id = 0
  JOIN wp_options wpo_su
    ON wpo_su.option_name = 'siteurl'
   AND wpo_su.blog_id = wpo.blog_id
 WHERE wpp.post_type = 'post'
   AND wpp.post_status = 'publish'
 ORDER BY wpp.post_date DESC 

Step 2 – Save it for later:
Now that you have that list dump it into an Excel column for later.

Step 3 – Format it for PHP:
Take all the URLs and dump them into Notepad++ or equivalent. On windows hit cntrl+H to bring up the find/replace function. Make sure to select ‘Search Mode’ -> ‘Extended’

For “Find What” you should put in rn and for ‘Replace With’ you should put in , and hit ‘Replace All’.

You should now have a list of all your URLs separated only by a comma.

Step 4 – Create a PHP File:

Create a new PHP file and set:

    <?php
$urlString = "http://www.urlsample1.com/article/sony-thing-and-stuff, http://www.urlsample1.com/article/warner-brothers-stuff";

    //this will replace the word article with the word product
    $newstring = str_replace("article", "product", $urlString);
    //turns string into array
    $myArray = explode(',', $newstring);
//loops through array to find first case of - and turn it to a /
for ($i = 0; $i < count($myArray); ++$i) {
       $haystack = $myArray[$i];
       $needle = "-";
       $replace = "/";
       $pos = strpos($haystack, $needle);

        if ($pos !== false) {
          $finalstring = substr_replace($haystack, $replace, $pos, strlen($needle));
        }
    //removes common url elements
    $newShort = str_replace("http://www.urlsample1.com", "", $finalstring);
    $oldShort = str_replace("http://www.urlsample1.com/product", "/article", $myArray[$i]);
    //prints out the old and new url in .htaccess format
    print("Redirect 301 " . $oldShort . " " . $newShort . "</br>");
};

?>

Step 5 – .Htaccess

Your output from above should look like:

Redirect 301 /product/sony-thing-and-stuff /product/sony/thing-and-stuff
Redirect 301 /product/warner-brothers-stuff /product/warner/brothers-stuff

and can be put into the .htaccess file.

Note: This method may become slow with Apache and isn’t preferable but it is the quickest way I can think of to get your client up and running on the new situation.