Preserving Referrer Info & Image Redirects

Hi cmgdesigns,
Sorry for the delay in reply, I was not around for the holiday weekend.

To answer the First Question:

Will this plugin preserve the referrer info on redirects?

Yes it will – BUT only when you are using a 301 redirect AND the content on the new page has the same relevance as the original page. If you just moved a page to a new site, the search engine should retain the link ranking for the URL (for the most part – but the domain name difference itself may change the ranking relevance slightly). If you redirect a page to a completely different page with different content, then the new page will be ranked according to the content on the new page, not on what you had on the original. Make sense?

Second Question:

And secondly, will it work on image redirects?

Yes it will – however, you have to make sure it follows the normal rules of the .htaccessfile. When WordPress creates the .htaccess file for permalinks, it adds some basic pattern matching that does the following:

1. If the URL to a file or folder actually finds a ‘real’ file or folder (meaning it exists on the server), load that file or folder.
2. If a file or folder does not exist, load WordPress (via the index.php file int he root) and look for the requested permalink URL.
3. If that URL permalink does not exist, throw a 404 error and load the 404 page.

Now, to actually make use of the plugin’s redirection functions, WordPress needs to load itself. BUT, if a file or folder exists on the server, the .htaccess file states that it will load that file first – ALWAYS. That means that WordPress will NEVER load if the file exists, which means the plugin will NEVER fire its redirect function (because it relies on WordPress to work).

To make use of an image redirect (or ANY media file redirect for that matter), you first need to make sure it does not exist on the server. That is the most common overlooked thing when trying to redirect images.

Make sure the image file (in your example, example.com/image.gif) does not exist, then you should be able to add it to the Quick Redirects to go to some other image.

Hope this makes sense.

Let me know if you still have problems.
Regards,
Don

Actually, re-reading this question, I see you are talking about the referrer, not the link ranking (my bad).

To answer that, No, it will not. The referrer will show the last location it was prior to the end destination – so it will show the referrer as the redirect URL, not the original URL. This cannot be helped.

Regards,
Don

No worries on the wait. Understood on the both instances.

Here is what I am trying to do. We have blog posts that are animated gifs (AG). If I put in the post link it will pull a still image from the AG instead of the AG.

If I post the link directly to the AG, then it brings in the full animation. However, when they click the image it will lead them directly to the image instead of the post (Giphy.com has done it somehow, but can’t for the life of me figure out how to…looks like something to do with a flashwrapper).

So my thought was to direct link to the image, and create a redirect to the post when someone clicked. I haven’t tried it, but suspect it wouldn’t work anyway because how is Facebook going to pull in the image if it’s being redirected (not to mention my post).

At this point, my workaround is taking a still image and overlay a play button, then when they click they are directed to my post. Not the best user experience, but can’t determine a better option yet.

Thanks again.

Yeah – that would definitely not work, as the image would never display because it is getting redirected.

Not sure how they are doing it at Giphy.com – but it looks like some custom thing they have set up.

Best of luck.
Don