Hey everyone. My name is John. This is my first post here so I thought I'd introduce myself as well. Ok. I'm don't have much experience with using redirects so please have patience. I'm not sure how much information you guys need. I'm having trouble getting a Redirect to work. I'm doing a remake of an old site that I did over 10 years ago and I'm going to need to do a lot of redirects once I change over, but I wanted to test it out to make sure I know what I'm doing before I get rid of the old site. My current old site is www.antstuff.net. I will be keeping the same domain when I change, but it's current url naming system is different from the program I use now (Joomla). It's current url syntax goes like: www.antstuff.net/html/ant_farm.html Whereas the remade Joomla site will simply be www.antstuff.net/ant-farms . I don't want to lose all of my inbound links so I'll need to redirect every old page to the new pages right? I wanted to test it first to see if I could get a redirect to work so I added a line to my .htaccess just to try and redirect from one page to another. Redirect 301 /html/ant_farm.html http://www.antstuff.net/html/queen_ants.html Nothing happens. It does not redirect to a different page at all. Am I missing something? Also, there is a bunch of other crap in my .htaccess file that has built up over the years. Could that mess anything up? Update: Interesting thing happened. When I went to submit this post, I got an error that said that there is a redirect in the url that I entered, please use the destination url instead. So I removed the line of code from my .htaccess before submitting. Nevertheless, nothing happens when visit that particular page. It's supposed to transfer me to the other page right?
Ok. I'm confused. So I just made a sitemap for my site, and I noticed that the page that I redirected is not listed. Does this mean that it is working? Yet when I click on the navigation bar in the site to go to that page, or if I type it into the address bar it still goes to that page. Is this how the redirect is supposed to work? What about the people who physically click on an old link to get to me site, will they be redirected? If not, how do I set that up?
Ok. I'm sorry for wasting everybody's time. It works. It must be my cookies or something. I tried it in a different browser and from a different computer and it redirects just fine.