Any way to redirect (301) pages for unpublished articles/links (404)?

Question

I am wondering if where is any way in joomla to solve following issue:

• I am having URLs (articles) which may have been externally linked
• Now I want to disable this links (unpublish)
• but if I unpublish I loose a backlink
• so I would like to have a option in Joomla to have a fallback for specific sub-URLs if they report a 404 to redirect them to the upper category menu-link

Is there any common plugin or even a standard of joomla available?

For more clearance out of the comments here some examples:

the old link sprachsuche google this was changed to sprachsuche google und siri this is the simple case there the URL only changed and I can handle it via a simple redirect and for this cases the redirect component is fine.

But if I have a URL, which is non accessible (since protected or outdated) e.g. job posts with a limited valid time like webdesign stuttgart which points to a 404.

Since I have a lot of such URLs, I would like to have a sort of redirect component, which detects such outdated links and gives me a option to redirect them with a pattern to the category page. Something like:

if ((status==404) && (article-publishing==disabled)) redirect-301 to karriere

Means I keep all links, and the content is matching to the link-visitor by ending on a carrer page. Have multiple such scenarios, but this is the easiest to explain. Of course could now go into the redirect component to handle all links manually. But this is only detected if someone checks it intentionally. I would like to have a sort of default behavior for the redirects.

Hope I could clarify the things now better?

Answer 1

In your error.php file you can add the following code:

if (($this->error->getCode()) == '301') {
    header('Location: /your error page');
    exit;
}