This might sound like an odd question but I am just not sure about it. Currently I switched our site to wordpress and needed to do some 301 redirects for the old pages. I installed the "redirection plugin" and it works great. But I have noticed that it changed nothing in my .htaccess file it still looks like this: Options +FollowSymLinks <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On # BEGIN WordPress <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] </IfModule> # END WordPress Doesn't google need to see the actual redirect in the htaccess file in order to transfer all traffic and page rank? I tried placing the redirect in the htaccess like this Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^onlinemarketingadvisors.com$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.onlinemarketingadvisors.com$ RewriteRule ^Seattle\-Website\-Design\.html$ "http\:\/\/www\.onlinemarketingadvisors\.com\/seattle\-seo\-services\.html" [R=301] <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> # BEGIN WordPress <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] </IfModule> # END WordPress deactivated the plugin and now all I get is the 404 error page. I'm just not sure if the plugin is in fact a real 301 redirect, because I still see the old page in the index but the new page has been cached already so I am a little confused. What would be the correct way of writting the access file to make sure that the Search engines are in fact seeing that change?
Show me an old URL and I'll check to see if it's doing the 301 redirect correctly. Anyway, google can't even read .htaccess (no one can, it's a private file on your server). The plugin simply does the redirecting via PHP code, not .htaccess - I'm sure it's correct.
what your saying makes sense. The 301 is working via the wordpress plugin, if I deactivate it then it stops. I just don't understand how the old page is still showing up in the index, could it be that the spiders just have'nt crawled the page lately, and therefore does not know that it is redirecting? one of the old pages is here: http://www.onlinemarketingadvisors.com/Seattle-Website-Design.html
I just checked and it's redirecting just fine via a http 301 response header. Anyway, how long has it been since you made this change? It could probably take up to a month or more for these changes to be represented on google, though to be sure you'd have to ask in the SEO forum.
Ok, thanks. I added the change about a week ago, normally it doesn't take this long but I guess I'll just be patient and see what happens.