301 Redirect for WordPress

I recently decided to move a post from one blog to another because I thought it was more relevant, so I decided to do a 301 redirect for all traffic trying to get to the old post to the new post.

If you do a search in Google for plugins you’ll find a few that can do 301 redirects, but generally they do it for 1 blog. For example, there’s a great WordPress plugin called “Redirection” that I thought would do the job. It has a good admin panel, and it’s pretty easy to use. Unfortunately it is also just for managing 1 blog. It does the following (which a lot of people might actually need):

• Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes
• Strip or add www to all your WordPress pages
• Redirect index.php, index.html, and index.htm access
• Redirection statistics telling you how many times a redirection has occurred, when it last happened, who tried to do it, and where they found your URL

The first one is something I really needed a long time ago, and the last 3 are to help you solve a “duplicate content” issue you might end up having with Google. For example, Google might view “www.geniosity.co.za” and “geniosity.co.za” as 2 different websites, and obviously they aren’t. Of course, I’m sure Google has worked on this issue, but who knows…

Anyway, here’s the juice. If you want to redirect a post from an old blog to a new blog, you’ll need to open your “.htaccess” file (which will be in the root folder of you WordPress installation) and add the following line:

Redirect 301 /2006/08/29/old-post-slug/ http://www.new-site.com/2007/02/05/new-post-slug/

If you are using the “Feedburner Feed Replacement” to redirect your RSS Feeds to FeedBurner, then make sure you add this line either before the “<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>” or after the “</IfModule>”

The first URL (after the 301) is just the post’s URL excluding your Blog’s domain. The new URL is the FULL URL of the new location of your post. This would also work if you were just moving it around within the same blog, but then I would just recommend you use the plugin above.

This might be a pain if you’re moving a LOT of posts, but I just had to move the one article, so it worked fine for me.