How do I add a 301 redirect when a 404 error pops up?

[Brad Flora]

We recently changed our site over to the ning architecture and lost a large number of links coming into our site.

The actual  number of links prohibits us from contacting each and every webmaster to ask if they would correct the broken link and have it go into new correct page on our site.

Instead, we would like to add a 301 redirect to our homepage for all 404 pages,  instead of the "this page is not found" page.


We've found that the "page is not found" page has a 98% bounce rate, and we would like to rememdy this by having that traffic just directed to our homepage.

How do we go about installing a 301 redirect when a 404 error occures?

Thanks in advance for your time.

[Phil McCluskey]

Hi Brad,

There isn't a mechanism to switch this on across the board, and I would advise against it in any case, since not having 404s can cause problems with Google. Instead I would suggest taking the most trafficked broken links and adding appropriate destinations for them in the network using the URL Rewriting tutorial.

[Brad Flora]

Phil,

Thank you for your reply, however I am having some trouble implementing my solution with the URL Mapping tool.

For example, I would like for the old, broken, url

"http://www.SPANnet.org/FAQ.htm"

to now point to

"http://www.spannet.org/page/publishing-faq"


I was trying

"/(FAQ.htm)$" as the pattern and "/page/publishing-faq" as the target and am having no luck.

Any suggestions you might have would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again.

[Phil McCluskey]

Hi Brad,

Rather than /page/publishing-faq, you'll need something like:

/index.php/page/id

where id is the numeric id of the page. Finding out the numeric id of the page can be a challenge, but if you go to the edit screen for the page, and view the html source of the page, you should find the id in the action parameter of the update form. Something like this:

<form id="add_page_form" action="http://example.ning.com/page/page/update?id=2034908:Page:1171" method="post">

so using that, the target becomes:

/index.php/page/2034908:Page:1171

Hope that helps!

[Brad Flora]

Phil,

Yes! Very helpful!

Thanks so much for your time, and your assistance in this matter!


bradley flora
SPANnet.org

[Brad Flora]

Phil,

It seems to me that the code has changed and these directions no longer lead me to a pages ID. Has the code changed and is this actually the case or am I just most recently overlooking the page ID?

[Jeff Rothe]

Phil,

I can't figure this out.  The code on the forum post I'm looking to update is not;

update?id=2034908:Page:1171

Rather;

update?id=xxxxxxx:Topic:xxxx

I put my rewrite rule a couple of different ways  on the URLMappings screen. For the broken URL,  I used the full original URL (I have a mapped domain to the NING url), I used my real ning subdomain URL, and I removed the domain altogether to just have the folder structure.

Nothing.

What am I doing wrong?

[Radialistas Brasileiros]

This is something else! Awesome!

Just tested and very very happy with the results! Will solve me many sittuations!

You guys should give this topic more proeminence and made more public this solution!

[Jane Noel]

I understand how to use this to redirect to a page, but how can I redirect to a forum or a group?  Some of the URLs on my old site would most appropriately link to my forums...but I can't seem to make that happen.