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My client has decided to completely revamp their website and no longer wants to use MijoSef, in fact they do not want to use any SEF component at all. At present google hase over 3250 urls indexed for the existing site, thus I need to redirect each of the indexed URL's to the new URL following the site update/move.

I have exported the URL's from MijoSef and have attempted to test the redirect by inserting one into the jos_redirect_links table, publishing it and then testing it. However the redirect does not seem to take effect. I have also tried the same with ReDJ and the redirect does not seem to take effect either.

For example, the url on the currently live site is is:

I have set up a redirect in ReDj (and in the core redirect component - now removed) to:

Is there another (better?) way to do this to ensure the indexed links do not return a 404? I'd be happy for some suggestions. The MijoSEF export contains over 13000 urls, thus I was thinking maybe I could scrape a list of indexed URL's in google, compare to the list from MiJoSEF and add the 3250 indexed redirects to the htaccess file? Is this a feasible method?

Thank you in advance. D

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2 Answers 2

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I a little confused with your question or likely your approach to do the redirect, but I ll give a try to post an answer to help you clear things out a bit:

This URL that you call the old URL, is a working URL in the site

http://www.waterfrontwest.com/new/index.php?option=com_iproperty&Itemid=649&id=731&view=property

While this URL is actually a 404 error.

http://www.waterfrontwest.com/new/property/mobile-home/waterfront-mobile-home-park-lake-cowichan-vancouver-island-dp13

It's not clear from where you get these URLs?

But, I don't know about ReDJ, but you can't redirect your first URL to the one you said - while the first one is actually working. To add to this that you are trying to redirect a working URL to a 404 URL.

So from where you get this URL : 

http://www.waterfrontwest.com/new/property/mobile-home/waterfront-mobile-home-park-lake-cowichan-vancouver-island-dp13

??

Do I suspect correctly that this is a URL that exists on the old version of site? One of those Google Indexed URLs?

If so, you are approaching the Redirects thing from the opposite way. As that indexed URL 

http://www.waterfrontwest.com/new/property/mobile-home/waterfront-mobile-home-park-lake-cowichan-vancouver-island-dp13

will be the one that after you switch to the new site, it will produces the 404 (it already does so). And this is the URL that you need to redirect to the new corresponding one that will be working on the site, and will be able to display the same content as before. The new URL that you need to redirect to will actually be the result of the SEF-isized: http://www.waterfrontwest.com/new/index.php?option=com_iproperty&Itemid=649&id=731&view=property.

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  • Apologies I got the URL's mixed round. The redirects when added into ReDJ now do redirect to the Non-sef version of the URL. Is there now anyway to rewrite the target of the redirect to a nice clean sef URL? This would mean a re-writing it twice? I'm basically trying to keep it as clean as possible. Thank you :)
    – Dtorr1981
    May 17, 2017 at 13:05
  • @Dtorr1981 it seems that your new URL is waterfrontwest.com/new/bc-waterfront-for-sale/property/… - so this is where you need to redirect the old URL.
    – FFrewin
    May 17, 2017 at 15:31
  • Thanks I have that, I;m trying to ascertain what the best method is to achieve this. At present I have created a MySQL query which is inserting the redirect links from MijoSEF But I am getting duplicate entries on the URL fields when the fields are not Identical - Odd! E.g (5304,'contact-waterfront-west', 'index.php?option=com_contact&Itemid=483&id=53&view=category'), is the first row and it says (5305,'waterfront-west', 'index.php?option=com_contact&Itemid=483&catid=53&id=1&view=contact'), is a duplicate based on 'waterfront-west'
    – Dtorr1981
    May 17, 2017 at 15:44
  • UPDATE: I have managed to get all of the URL's in but it seems some may not be quite right - I need to check MijoSEF for any that aren't published as I am receiving a 'Too Many Redirects' error. I never thought this would be such a pain!
    – Dtorr1981
    May 17, 2017 at 16:03
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Use com_redirect and make sure you have the plugin enabled. As I assume you have a proper experience with SQL so it should be quite easy to insert all the redirections to the database (just make sure all of them are published). If it is possible as a new URL (the place where user should be redirected) write a relative URL (e.g. /your/new/url). That way you will not have to change it after moving and you can test those URL's before going on production server.

If it is possible that you have some bad URL's on that list you can test it quite easily by writing a simple bot that will test them for you on a dev server. Just prepare the old URLs in the database by changing the base of your URL to match development URL or change them to relative ones. Then in the bot application just execute each of them (for example by file_get_contents function). After you execute the whole list just check 404 count on the URLs in com_redirect component. When you finish fixing or removing all the bad URLs just change the base of your old URLs back to the production (or use a relative URL as old URL and new URL, that way you will not have to change them later). That way you have all your URL's ready for migration.

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  • Thanks for your input Artur, I thought the native com_redirect only worked if the URL's were registered by the plugin? I've exported all redirects from MijoSEF (over 13000) and imported into ReDJ via SQL but received a 'Too many redirects' error on the front end - Clearly something isn't quite right. I think my only option is to break the SQL query down and import a few lines at a time and test at each stage....unless there are anymore options?
    – Dtorr1981
    May 22, 2017 at 20:57
  • com_redirect does use database as input. You can insert it directly into the database without a need for plugin. It just has to be enabled cause that is the one that creates a redirections later. You just have to be sure that you have a right columns values in a redirection table row. I was doing it previously. Most obvious is to be sure that state/published field is on 1 and the old and new urls are ok. If you have redirections loop an obvious conclusion is that some of your redirects create it. You can check it easly in server error logs (not joomla logs).
    – Artur Stępień
    May 22, 2017 at 21:59
  • Thanks Artur, I'll try the insert in the native redirect and see how I get on :) I'll post back.
    – Dtorr1981
    May 22, 2017 at 23:28

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