301 redirect dynamic pages

dannyman1234

Hello,

I have a big problem. I 've got a site with more then a million product links.
I recently change the URL to a nicer url. My old links were:

domain.nl/111-category/222-product/hairdryer.htm

New urls are

domain.nl/111/222/category/product/hairdryer.htm

google still indexes all the old links, after it gets 404 headers from those links for 4 days and i have the worst pagerank now.

Even when i type www.mydomain.com in google it doesnt give me my homepage.

What i'm trying to do, is to make a 301 redirect from the old url to the new one in mod_rewrite

RewriteRule ^{[a-zA-Z0-9&-+._'"]~([0-9])/[a-zA-Z0-9&-+._'"]~([0-9]).htm$} ([0-9])/([0-9])/[a-zA-Z0-9&-+._'"]/([a-zA-Z0-9&-+._'"]).htm [R=301,L]

so i hoped it will check for the old format and then redirects the old links to the new format, but without any luck.:queasy:

What am i doing wrong?

Then another followup. There are also links in google like:
page.php?seach=1 , but i used a nofollow in robots.txt for this file, still after 4 days it is indexed.

dagon

it could take more than a month for ggogle to reindex your site, although it usually takes days, i don't think you have waited long enough to worry.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=19494

have a read of the goggle webmaster stuff

dannyman1234

This is not the solution to wait. There is a solution to use 301 redirects, so all the old links will still be working and it will keep the pagerank.

I just do something wrong with the reqrite rule i mentioned

i don't think you have waited long enough to worry

I day is already long enought to worry, i can see you don't take your websites seriously enough.

dagon

dannyman1234;10951381 wrote:
I day is already long enought to worry, i can see you don't take your websites seriously enough.

but the clients still love me, so that's ok :rolleyes:

kkobashi

May I ask why you did what you did? To make it look friendlier? To make pages rank better?

Have you ever taken a look at Amazon.com URLs? They are not user friendly at all. How about JC Penny? Home Depot? Same deal. Ugly URLs. But does that stop people from visiting their site? No. Its not about the URL. Its about how you create your site so that the user can navigate through menus an have a good search feature to find what they are looking for.

Whenever you change your URLs via rewriting on existing site, especially for as many pages as you have I would think you would weigh the risk involved. In my opinion, it wasn't worth the risk to rewrite the URLs.

domain.nl/111-category/222-product/hairdryer.htm

to this

domain.nl/111/222/category/product/hairdryer.htm

111 and 222 mean nothing to me as a user, even worse to a search engine. If you want to create truly useful friendly URLs, you have to think in terms of the user (maybe even a blind person) and how he/she is going to try to remember where a hairdryer is on their next visit. In other words:

domain.nl/electronics/beauty/hairdryer is a nice URL for the hairdryer section index page
domain.nl/electronics/beauty/conair/127LZ is a nice URL look for the Conair 127LZ hairdryer page

dannyman1234

Thanks for your message.

I did it, because I would like to use the product and category names at the end of the URL, looks slightly better then the old urls.

Well I would really like to have nice urls like you said:

domain.nl/electronics/beauty/hairdryer

But, then I need to match on category/product title or sth which is not always reliable, becoz some product titles can be identical.
.
Now I match on unique category and product ID, which is more reliable.

I haven't found out how to match on categoryId / productId and strip those values out of the URL.

I am not a specialist in this field.
So I thought if i could manage making 301 redirect from the old links to the new ones, then the links pagerankings still remain the same, that's why.

Thanks for any help

Cheers

Danny

kkobashi

Danny, this question really doesn't have anything to do with PHP. It is a modrewrite/regular expression issue. I would recommend going to the modrewrite.com beginner's corner or webmasterworld.com in the Apache server category and seeing if anyone can assist you on this.

dannyman1234

Hi thanks, i wanted to fo to http://forum.modrewrite.com/ but in this forum it's so hard to find the registration link, there is no link to register anywhere that I can find. It's really unbelievable, that's the reason i could not register.

Als if you go to the login page: http://forum.modrewrite.com/ucp.php?mode=login
to link to register anywhere, its very unprofessional.

Do you know where to register?

Thanks

danny