Way to have a “catch-all” 301 after doing ~120 other 301s?

  • Resolved lakeshore

    (@lakeshore)


    10 months ago

    I inherited a website that has been around since the 90s, and has thousands of urls hanging around on other websites that are no longer live. They result in 404 redirects. The url scheme was very 90s and extremely messy as well, something you would never use today.

    We have redirected about 120 of the more active urls to updated content using 301, and they are working great. Still, the 2nd most common page that visitors get according to my Analytics is “404 – Page Not Found”.

    It would take a month go to through and setup individual redirects for all of those old urls.

    Is there a way for me to tell the plugin “If one of the 120 redirected urls is requested, send them to the new page. But if any other of the thousands of urls are requested, send them to the home page”?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author John Godley

    (@johnny5)

    Will sending them to the home page provide any benefit as opposed to returning a 404?

    Thread Starter lakeshore

    (@lakeshore)

    Thanks John, your comment made me think. A 404 might not be terrible and they are still on my site, able to search.

    Through GA4, I found a way to identify what paths people were getting to the 404 page from. I’m going to use that to do a specific redirect (to the next most appropriate content) for the more common paths, but maybe just leave the other many stragglers as a 404.

    Plugin Author John Godley

    (@johnny5)

    You can also use the 404 log in the plugin, and the ‘group by’ dropdown, to see what the most popular 404s are. It will show things that GA can’t show.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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