Question about "Page Paths and Location"

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Hi,

So I'm in the process of moving a friend's blog into Concrete5. I think I've got everything working, but I'm going to want to make sure that any links that are out there pointing to the old blog URL's are appropriately 301'd to the new URL.

Am I correct in assuming that if I add additional "Page Paths and Location" to the newly-created C5 pages that Concrete5 will automagically generate a 301 Redirect from that path to the new one? Or should I explicitly do it in the htaccess file myself?

And... can I do this for URLs that had query string parameters?

For instance:

OLD PAGE: blog/my-blog.php?id=5372823600812255617

NEW C5 PAGE: blog/hyphenated-title-of-the-blog-entry/

Thanks!

- John

P.S... And from an SEO perspective... do you think I'm better off trying to enforce the old page naming system onto C5 as much as possible and letting the C5-preferred URLs become the additional Page Paths?

arrestingdevelopment
 
mesuva replied on at Permalink Best Answer Reply
mesuva
For old page paths that have query strings, I'd do this in an .htaccess file. I don't believe the additional page paths in concrete5 can handle query strings. I've had to do this myself for a site I converted from Joomla (without pretty urls) to concrete5, and it worked very well with manual 301 redirects in the .htaccess file.

I'm personally happy managing such one-off processes by manually creating the htaccess file, but I did find this add-on:
http://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/seo-301-redirects/...

About your SEO question, I think you are better of creating redirects towards the new, concrete5 generated paths. They should be better for SEO as they'll have keywords in them and there shouldn't be any penalties for changing the paths of pages as long as the 301s are done properly.
arrestingdevelopment replied on at Permalink Reply
arrestingdevelopment
Thanks, Mesuva. Following your advice I did some Googling and found info on some htaccess re-write rules. I combined that with some extra "Page Paths and Locations" for each page so that I could just have the rewrite rule be generic... instead of having to come up with individual re-directs for each page.

So... a page that had a path of: "blog/my-blog.pgp?id=123456789"

Now gets re-written to be: "blog/123456789"

And I added in an additional "Page Path and Location" in C5 for the appropriate target page of "blog/123456789".

So far... it seems to be working like a charm.

Thanks for the pointer.

- John