Redirecting links in Google

[philiporchard]

OK... here is the scenario.

We are working on cleaning up the dirty URLs in our sites, and for the business listings we now use the structure:

city/listing/123456-Business-Name.

E.g. www.cardiff.co.uk/listing/119788-Posh-Nosh

Previously, the URL for this business looked like this: www.cardiff.co.uk/Detail.aspx?bid=119788.

In fact , this is very similar to the way that Qype lists the businesses in its directory.


The result is that we will probably end up with both the clean and dirty urls in Google, as they are both perfectly valid.

Ideally, I'd just like the new cleaned URLs appearing.

If anyone has any experience in this, or thoughts on matching old URLs to new URLs, then please let me know. Thanks.

Also thanks to Nick on here, who has given some invaluable advice.

Phil

 

[Ashton]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm9onOGTgeM

 

[retired_member34]

Ideally you would 301 the old to the new, you really don't want both sets being indexed by Google (even though G is pretty good at figuring this out now), or even linked to. A regular expression in the htaccess will do it.

If you do want both urls to work for some reason, then set "rel=canonical" in the head of the old with a link to the new, this will instruct G which url to index.

Google "htaccess 301 regular expression" and "rel=canonical" for more.

 

[philiporchard]

Thanks - the video is very interesting!

 

[mat]

This may help you....

http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/website-design/79091-htaccess-guru-needed.html

 

[philiporchard]

Thanks for the replies - Will look into.

Interesting that after adding this discussion thread, if you search for
'Posh Nosh Cafe Cardiff' it lists the page I posted on Acorn in No.1 spot...

Google loves Acorn

 

[jj1]

No expert, but I beleive you need a 301 to prevent some being dumped into supplemental due to duplicate content - however, from memory, I remember reading a Matt Cutts q and a session where he said that you need to manually change all backlinks to new urls as some link juice will evaporate.

 

[philiporchard]

Thanks, yes the You Tube link in the thread is very interesting. I've created a sitemap of the canonical links - those that are the correct and true ones.

That will be a start once I get that uploaded.

Will look at either 301 or 310 redirects after.

 

[ddwebguru]

it's true that url should be furnished as such search engine as well searchers could easily get the information about the webpage.