Mequoda Pro Q&A Website Conversion Architecture

How well do 301 redirects work?

Post author By Amanda MacArthur
Post date September 16, 2009
No Comments on How well do 301 redirects work?

[question]

Are there any known issues with having a large number of 301 redirects in an .htaccess file?

We’re redirecting our entire website — our .htaccess file contains well over 400 301 redirects — and we’re getting some errors. We set up the redirects according to the accepted convention, and our topic pages seem to work, but our article pages do not.

The resulting “bad” URL is a combination of the new URL (at the beginning) and the old URL (at the end), with no slash in between. Does this sound like a host/server problem or a WordPress problem?

[/question]
[answer]

The condition you describe sounds like an anomaly and not a serious WordPress problem. We’ve seen sites with thousands of 301 redirects that work flawlessly. The determining factor is the amount of traffic going to the old URLs.

[/answer]

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By Amanda MacArthur

Research Director & Managing Editor

Amanda is responsible for all the articles you read on the Mequoda Daily portal and every email newsletter delivered to your inbox from us. She is also our in-house social media expert and would love to chat with you over on @Mequoda. She has worked with Mequoda for almost a decade, helping to evolve the Mequoda Method through research, testing and developing new best practices in digital publishing, editorial strategy, email marketing and audience development. Amanda is a co-author of our four digital publishing handbooks.