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View Full Version : Importance of 301 Redirects if the changed url still works


unflores
11-09-2009, 10:10 PM
I have a new url structure that we are moving to. Here is an htaccess example:

RewriteRule ^review/?$ /?f=contribute [NC,QSA]


?f=contribute will still be a valid url however I am now concerned that during the change the SEO ranks will diminish because the page will be accessible via both www.site.com/review and www.site.com/?f=contribute. I wanted to set up a 301 redirect to help ease the change.


First of all, is this necessary? I'm not sure how much it will affect my page rankings, I'm also not sure if having dupe content will be bad or not.

Also,

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^f=contribute$
RewriteRule ^$ /review? [R=301]

RewriteRule ^review/?$ /?f=contribute [NC,L]

The following rules put me in an infinite loop of redirection, which is a bummer. Is there anything glaringly wrong I'm doing here?

I want it to redirect to /review when the query string f=contribute, but on apache I still need it to be treated as f=contribute...Hope that makes sense.

-Austin

abduraooft
11-10-2009, 07:25 AM
First of all, is this necessary? I'm not sure how much it will affect my page rankings, I'm also not sure if having dupe content will be bad or not.Yes, a 301 redirect will keep the same page rank as that of the old one. But keeping the two urls with the same content is dangerous. See http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359