Two rules of thumb:

1. “Just because it appears to work for the test URL, doesn’t mean it will work the way you want it to work for all the different URL formats that will be thrown at it in real life”.

2. “Error 500? – Only 499 to go”. (with thanks to jdMorgan at WebmasterWorld, for that one).

And I definitely always recommend that the number of hops in a redirect be minimized. But it’s a good experiment to see if your theory on PageRank not transferring with more than one holds true.

For some URL request formats it looks like the browser might hit a Redirection Chain of up to four steps. This can be quite dangerous. PageRank isn’t passed through anything more than a single-step redirect.

It is best to craft the rules so that the most specific rules are listed first and they also fix all the other problems (for that URL) that the later rules also fix. That will mean that for any URL request, the target URL will be reached in just one hop.

*** Within .htaccess, some redirects use RedirectMatch, others use Redirect, and others are really URL rewrites using mod_rewrite. ***

If directives from Mod_Alias and Mod_Rewrite are included within the same .htaccess file, then you cannot guarantee the order that they will be processed. The processing order is the reverse of the order of module loading, as defined in the httpd.conf file. In some cases the server will do the internal rewrite first (so updating the internal path reference), and then a redirect will kick in and “expose” that internal filepath to the outside world in a new URL. That action can be a site killer.

If you need a mix of redirects and rewrites, it is best to use Mod_Rewrite for all of them. Make sure that you list the redirects first (in order, from most specific to most general), and the rewrites last (in order, from most specific to most general). In this way, there will be just one redirect acted on, and one rewrite if needed, for each URL requested.

I’d hate to go out and buy some fancy vampire cookie (http://bakingbites.com/2008/10/vampire-cookies/) and send it to you only to have it rejected because you’ve set your privacy settings to reject 3rd party cookies.

So if it turns out that I have to make it myself, let me know…

On another note, kudos for the CNN snippet (though personally I thought they ranted way too much, didn’t include more from you and clearly CNN would have had a much higher unique visitor count today had they mentioned your name in the article headline…

I have a blog with 100 posts. Now I would like to move the entire content to new url like what you did. In those 100 posts few posts are ranked well in search engines. If I would apply simply the 301 redirect to all my posts then “Does the search engine rankings will remain the same?”. It means “Does the old post url will replace by the new url in the search engine results with the same position?”.

If your answer is yes. I am happy.

If your answer is no then please let me know what else needs to be done to get those positions with the new url.

Thanks in advance

Anyway, since you mentioned you are writing more notes on redirection options, I would be grateful if you can touch on the following in any future post:

1) Does it affect a site’s credibility or the organic rankings in anyway if there are too many redirects. Like I guess you have redirected all blog posts on the old domain to this new one. So though it may take time to bring the rankings back, but do you think all these redirects have any combined negative effect just because you redirect too many pages.

2) If there’s a new large site that doesn’t have any backlinks and no visitors yet, and they decide to either change the domain or want to optimize and rewrite URLs; would it be better for them to 301 redirect all previous pages to new ones (large site may mean 500+ pages), or should they skip the redirect and just put the pages on the new domain/URL since they don’t have any links or traffic yet?

Thanks for your time.