Redirects not working

[Gramps]

Hi,

I've upgraded from V1 to V3 and none of the old urls are redirecting to the new, getting 404's

I've disabled all plugins except DF, updated store and settings and tried again.

I've also tried giving category changing category from CS to CP and it still throws 404's.
Tried a bunch of different settings for the urls.

I've checked my .htaccess and disabled any redirects that might affect this.

Checked my servers error log, no errors.

I'm out of ideas?

The site is running on 3.12 Wordpress MS
DF Plugin 3.1.5.3214
Store 9066

store url http://petoutletmall.com/pet-supplies/store (this used to have trailing / but not now?)

One product that is/was available in both versions:
http://petoutletmall.com/pet-supplie...at-playground/

and (old url v1)
http://petoutletmall.com/pet-supplie...30159-2072-ss/

I have my old search engine(paid, not DF) with V1 links(big Search button, upper right) and the DF search just below that. Helps to find products that are still available.

I have the store in maintenance mode right now. I did disable that too to check redirects and also tried firefox and IE.

I can DM login to the site if you need. Just let me know which ones.

Thanks,
Gramps

[Eric]

Hi

From what I gather, your store used to be here: http://petoutletmall.com/pet-supplies/store

How did you get your store to appear as a "sub-directory" of "pet-supplies"?

Eric

[Gramps]

Hi

I created a blank page for it when I installed V1. Its shows created 02/15/2010.

Daryl

[Eric]

But how is it showing here: /pet-supplies/store

By default (when you installed the plugin) it should have appeared here: /store

[Gramps]

I setup /pet-supplies as a subdomain when I was running MU, before MS. I really can't remember the whole process, but I did have a physical folder for awhile of /pet-supplies that I put the other search engine in another folder called search.

This was before I really understood how MU worked and had to add a few files into the /pet-supplies folder to get MU to run. Like index.php, wp-cron, and my sitemaps for the store.

I switched hosts somewhere in there, and came back to the one I'm at currently(since Dec).

Yahoo still has a few pages in their cache you can see here(google killed all but pet-supplies/store after the 1st day I had 404's, hence maintence mode, in hopes they won't drop it completely):
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com...&fr2=seo-rd-se

Looks like they dropped about 300, there were 800 something last week.

And then after the update to DF, everything was looking good, so I pulled out the extra files and removed the self made /pet-supplies and renamed it /s/ and left the search engine in it.

The store was still working. so I renamed the index, the cron, and the htaccess in the /s/ folder and the store still worked. I figured, ok, everything is working, I might as well make the installation of MU/MS be proper as it should have been over a year ago.

So, I guess you could say I stumbled my way through it, smoke and mirrors? hahah.

I would prefer keeping the '/pet-supplies part, for seo, but if I have to create a /store instead, that's ok too, to get the redirects to work as that is my main concern as Yahoo and Google are slowly picking away at the site.

Gramps

[Eric]

Hi

Wow, very complicated. I can't say for sure if you'll be able to get it to work as we never officially supported MU in version 1.5 and therefore did not write the new plugin to compensate for MU installations.

Additionally, the store page never worked if it was a sub-page. This wasn't your case. You had the separate blog installed in a sub-directory but the URL is the same.

I've tested your settings on my local site and I'm just not able to get it to work for you.

So, you have a couple of choices:

1. Install a blog here ( petoutletmall.com/pet-supplies/ ) and then run your store from that sub-folder blog. This is basically what you did last time, only using MU.

2. Or (and this is more complicated and I'm still not sure it will work) add some rewrite code to your .htaccess file which removes the "pet-supplies" portion of the URL from the URL, redirecting all traffic to petoutletmall.com/pet-supplies/store/xxx to petoutletmall.com/store/xxx. You'll want to make sure that it is a 301 redirect so you will eventually be able to remove the redirect after all of the new pages have been re-indexed by the search engines.

Obviously, option 1 is the easiest and it pretty straightforward. Option 2 is trickier and I'm not even sure it will work.

Eric

[Gramps]

Hi,
Quick update. I did get all the redirects working, plus a little more.

Here is what I came up with:

Remove the 'pet-supplies'
Redirect ^pet-supplies/store/$ http://petoutletmall.com/store [R=301]

And the next 3 lines redirect all the old categories.

RewriteRule ^pet-supplies/store/department/([^_]+)_(.*)$ http://petoutletmall.com/pet-supplies/store/department/$2 [R=301,L]

RewriteRule ^pet-supplies/store/department/([^_]+)_([^_]+)_(.*)$ http://petoutletmall.com/pet-supplies/store/department/$3 [R=301,L]

RewriteRule ^pet-supplies/store/department/([^_]+)_([^_]+)_([^_]+)_(.*)$ http://petoutletmall.com/pet-supplies/store/department/$4 [R=301,L]


Is the [R=301] part needed for the /pet supplies/store/ to /store as choosing the Redirect option in the factory I am assuming has one already? Is it ok to have 2 301's?

One strange part about it all is somewhere the pet-supplies is getting added back in, or not fully removed, but everything is working as far as old links go.

Thanks for your direction and help!

Gramps

[Eric]

Hi

Glad you got it working. Yes, it's fine to have multiple 301's.

I think pet-supplies is getting added back to the URL because it's still part of your 301 rewrite rules.

Eric