Last night I put the new version of the Cube Websites website live, and as part of the launch process I went through all the URLs from the old version of the site, and those which no longer existed I redirected to the most relevant URL on the new version of the site.
To do this I carried out the following steps:
- Crawl the old version of the site using Xenu’s Link Sleuth to get a list of all the existing URLs
- Crawl the new version of the site using Xenu to get a list of all the new URLs available
- In Excel I made a spreadsheet, where the first column contained all the old URLs, and I filled in the second column by selecting the most relevant URLs on the old site
- Saved the spreadsheet as a CSV file
- Created a rewrite rule generator to create Rewrite Rules which can be copied and pasted and pasted into a .htaccess file for the 301’s
The tool I created is now available for anyone else to use and you can find it on the 301 Rewrite Rule Generator page.
Just upload your CSV and click the Go button, within seconds you’ll have a list of 301 Rewrite Rules for your website 🙂
What is the generator code for 404, 501?