What are the impact of doing URL Rewriting instead of 301 redirections whille optimizing a blog?
-
In WordPress, with the ALL In ONE SEO pluggingm we've optimze the permalinks to show more keewords in the URL'. What can be the impact?
-
Hi Alexandre,
You will need to look at the code in the .htaccess file generated by All in One SEO to see whether the plugin is just using URL rewriting or creating 301 redirects. As far as I am aware, that particular plugin does not have an option to manually stipulate when you wish to create a 301, but the only sure way is to check the code.
You will need to go into your wordpress /blog directory and download the .htaccess file, then open it in a text editor (like notepad). This is a separate .htaccess file, specifically relating to what happens within your wordpress installation.The one in the root folder for your site will not tell you what you are wanting to know.
I don't use All In One SEO as I prefer the Yoast plugin, but typically, what you might expect to see is code that looks something like this:
BEGIN WordPress
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]</ifmodule>END WordPress
The key to identifying whether the plugin is using standard URL rewrites or creating a 301 Redirect is to look at the very last part of the Rule - the part that is enclosed in square brackets [ ]
A plain vanilla flavored standard URL Rewrite Rule will end with [L]
If the Rule is creating a 301 (Permanent) Redirect, it will end with [R=301,L]
and for a 302 (Temporary) Redirect, it will end with [R=302,L]
As far as your question, which I understand to be asking essentially, "what is the difference" between the two:
-
A standard URL Rewrite is simply instructing the server that any request for a certain URL should be served a different URL. As far as the search engine is concerned, nothing changes. It is simply used to change the ugly URL to a pretty URL (in your case one that contains the keywords you want).
-
A 301 redirect serves the alternative URL, but also sends a signal to the search engine that the URL requested has been permanently replaced with the one that is served. This indicates to the search engine that the requested URL should be removed from the index and replaced with the URL that is served. A 301 redirect also signals to the search engine that most of the link value being passed to the requested URL should now be passed to the URL that replaces it in the index.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
-
Hi Alexandre,
You will need to look at the code in the .htaccess file generated by All in One SEO to see whether the plugin is just using URL rewriting or creating 301 redirects. As far as I am aware, that particular plugin does not have an option to manually stipulate when you wish to create a 301, but the only sure way is to check the code.
You will need to go into your wordpress /blog directory and download the .htaccess file, then open it in a text editor (like notepad). This is a separate .htaccess file, specifically relating to what happens within your wordpress installation.The one in the root folder for your site will not tell you what you are wanting to know.
I don't use All In One SEO as I prefer the Yoast plugin, but typically, what you might expect to see is code that looks something like this:
BEGIN WordPress
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]</ifmodule>END WordPress
The key to identifying whether the plugin is using standard URL rewrites or creating a 301 Redirect is to look at the very last part of the Rule - the part that is enclosed in square brackets [ ]
A plain vanilla flavored standard URL Rewrite Rule will end with [L]
If the Rule is creating a 301 (Permanent) Redirect, it will end with [R=301,L]
and for a 302 (Temporary) Redirect, it will end with [R=302,L]
As far as your question, which I understand to be asking essentially, "what is the difference" between the two:
-
A standard URL Rewrite is simply instructing the server that any request for a certain URL should be served a different URL. As far as the search engine is concerned, nothing changes. It is simply used to change the ugly URL to a pretty URL (in your case one that contains the keywords you want).
-
A 301 redirect serves the alternative URL, but also sends a signal to the search engine that the URL requested has been permanently replaced with the one that is served. This indicates to the search engine that the requested URL should be removed from the index and replaced with the URL that is served. A 301 redirect also signals to the search engine that most of the link value being passed to the requested URL should now be passed to the URL that replaces it in the index.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
-
I'm not 100% familiar with all that ALL IN ONE SEO PACK is doing there, but usually when you use mod_rewrite (most commonly that I've seen amongst SEO's to rewrite to 'www'), it IS a 301 redirect.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ranking for non-existing content which is 301 redirected
Hey there, In the beginning of this year I've made complete site migration from Dutch language to English. All the old Dutch URL's were 301 redirected to the English versions. I naturally lost rankings for all Dutch keywords during the next month. On the website there is no Dutch content anymore. But what happened now is that five months later the website started to rank for the Dutch keywords again. The page snippets in SERP are in English but the URL's shown are in Dutch (ending with .nl) and whenever a user clicks on the snippet he/she gets 301 to the correct English version. Any ideas what could be the reason for re-ranking of non-existing pages which gets 301 in SERP?
Technical SEO | | benesmartin0 -
Missing 301 redirects
I just had a developer friend call me in a panic, because they had gone live with a new site and found out (the hard way) that they had missed some pages on their 301 redirects. So the pages are appearing in Google but serving 404s. Ouch! So their question was: other than running a report for 404 errors in something like Screaming Frog, is there a way to hunt down ONLY pages serving 404s, then export to CSV so they can be redirected? Anyone got any tricks up their sleeve?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
301 or 410 a Pop Up Window with a New URL
I asked our development team to 301 Pop Up window URLs back to their complimentary product page as we've changed URLs for all of our Pop Ups. We have 100,000s of products on our site, so the number of rewrites are becoming unmanageable and slows server response times (their words). They want to kill these 301's after a prescribed amount of time. Should they just become 410s, leave them as 404s (current state), or insist that we keep them as 301's?
Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn0 -
301 redirect not working
Hi there! I have recently moved a domain that has been indexed by google and setup redirects so that it forwards to the new domain. It seems like the only redirect that actually is working is the canonical and main domain but every other page and or page nested within a folder are not working. Here is an example of some of the redirects. Am I doing this wrong? It seems to be going to the new domain but can't find the actual pages.... RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | twotd
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !agoodsweep.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://agoodsweep.com/$1 [L,R=301]
redirect 301 woodstoveservicerepair.html http://agoodsweep.com/woodstoveservicerepair/
redirect 301 /westchesterchimney.html http://agoodsweep.com/west-chester-chimney/ Thanks in advance for any help!!0 -
301 redirect
What is a proper way to redirect any url containing a give word (anywhere in the url) to another sepcified url? Is it like this? RedirectMatch 301 ^thisword$ http://domain.com/newlocation
Technical SEO | | sesertin1 -
Is this a safe 301 redirect?
We are moving our site from one platform to another. Currently on our site we have two homepages. "www.homepage.com" and "www.homepage.com/Index" Both pages have some high quality links pointing in on them. The problem: We are going to be doing a 301 redirect from "www.homepage.com/Index" page to "www.homepage.com" as we are moving platforms at this time we weren't going to create a "www.homepage.com/Index" page all. This leaves this page as an empty URL. With this webpage disappearing all together will we lose traction as we are redirecting an empty URL? Or is it better to recreate this "www.homepage.com/Index" on our new platform redirect it and wait for google to deIndex this page for us? As well is there a tutorial for how to implement 301 redirects or is this something worth looking for a developer and pay someone to do?
Technical SEO | | HCGDiet0 -
Parked Domain blog directory not redirecting
My newly parked domain name, (our main website had to switch primary domains) is not redirecting properly and is causing our blog to be duplicate content. My 301 redirects work for everything else, but our parked domain /blog directory is not redirecting. I can type in both urls and then the blog appears on both sites. Not good. If I delete my blog .htaccess file, then it redirects fine. However, then our blog links are broken. So it has to do something with our .htaccess files. I do have a .htaccess file for our website, saying redirect everything to correct location, so i think this is interfering, but I cannot pinpoint it. this is the .htaccess file for the blog. BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | hfranz
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress main sites .htaccess (i am trying to pinpoint the issue here) Options +Includes
AddType text/html .htm .html
AddHandler server-parsed .htm .html
Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?parkeddomain.com [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^newdomain.com [NC] RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^?]*)? RewriteRule (.*) /$1? [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.php RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.htm RewriteRule ^(.*)index.htm$ http://www.newdomain/$1 [R=301,L] RedirectMatch 301 /index.php/(.*) /$1 Is there something obvious here, that does not look right?0 -
Too many 301 redirects - good or bad?
Hi, Currently, page A is redirecting to page B. I am in the process of developing new site for the same domain and this time page B will be redirected to page C. This is gonna happen on many pages. Is it correct or should i adopt some other strategy? Will it have adverse effect on the speed of my site? Page A -----> Page B ------> Page C Regards, Shailendra
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0