vidmarc Posted August 8, 2013 Share Posted August 8, 2013 How do we redirect potential customers from google's old links to our new links? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
havenswift-hosting Posted August 8, 2013 Share Posted August 8, 2013 You can create 301 redirect commands within your .htaccess file - one per old indexed url pointing to the new url. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vidmarc Posted August 8, 2013 Author Share Posted August 8, 2013 Thanks - is there anywhere I can find instructions on how to do this? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
havenswift-hosting Posted August 8, 2013 Share Posted August 8, 2013 There is a huge amount of information available online and a search in Google will give you more than you ever need. You will also be able to create redirects through your hosting control panel. Whichever way you do it, be careful though as it can cause problems with the site if not done 100% correctly even causing infinite loop problems causing the website to not display. The commands have to exactly correct and also positioned in the correct place within the .htaccess file or they will not work and can also cause other directives in the file to stop working. cPanel and Plesk (hosting control panels) are generally very poor at adding these in - the syntax is *usually* correct but they normally add them at the bottom of the file. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vidmarc Posted August 8, 2013 Author Share Posted August 8, 2013 I have searched but couldn't find anything definitive. Is it worth doing this? How long will google take to re-index the new site, and is there a simple way to get this done quicker? OK, I think I need to submit a site map but all I can see on the server is: sitemap.xml.gz Can I submit this? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vidmarc Posted August 8, 2013 Author Share Posted August 8, 2013 Done. Sitemap: /sitemap.xml This Sitemap was submitted Aug 8, 2013, and processed Aug 8, 2013. 430 URLs submitted Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
havenswift-hosting Posted August 8, 2013 Share Posted August 8, 2013 If the old site had been around for a while and you had pages that were indexed and ranked in Google then it is 100% definitely worth doing otherwise you lose all of the benefit of those old pages.Submitting a sitemap is certainly worth doing although that wont specifically help with creating 301's to preserve previously indexed ranking pages. Also be aware that CubeCart's sitemap has to be manually created and re-created (a very large number of people create it once and dont update it but Google and the other search engines will continue to see and pick it up if it exists !) and it also isnt a specialist sitemap generation product so doesnt include image / video / news sitemap files which are also extremely important if you have any of these on your site. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vidmarc Posted August 8, 2013 Author Share Posted August 8, 2013 The problem is we've changed the categories and what's in them, so I don't think it's going to be worthwhile. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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