htaccess redirect - hundreds of posts - wordpress

Question

Wordpress Redirects
My client has a WP website with a very bad permalinks structure and few hundreds "product" pages that they created as simple posts with bunch of HTML.
For example:
http://www.website.com/article/sony-tv-42-inch
http://www.website.com/article/iphone-5-2-black
http://www.website.com/article/samsung-dvd-player-12455
I am creating a new site from scratch and planning to use custom post types for Products section and organize URLS like:
http://www.website.com/product/sony/tv-42-inch
http://www.website.com/product/apple/iphone-5-black
http://www.website.com/product/samsung/dvd-player-12455
Since he doesnt want to lose any traffic or SEO ratings, i was wondering what would be the simplest solution for htaccess redirect for few hundred posts?
If he only had dozen of them, i could do it manually, but few hundreds...
Also, bare in mind that this is clean WP install with a theme built from scratch (i am working locally and most likely will be importing products via CSV file) so i cant just change the permalinks structure on production website.
Any help would be appreciated

Answer 1

It'd be fairly easy for you to re-write from
http://www.website.com/product/sony-tv-42-inch
to
http://www.website.com/product/sony-tv-42-inch
but that extra / is going to present a problem.
As mentioned by some others you certainly want a 301 for SEO purposes, so here is what I would do.
Step 1 - Get current URLS:
Get a list of all current post permalinks. This SQL query for MySQL by David George should do the trick.
SELECT wpp.post_title,
wpp.guid,
wpp.post_date,
CONCAT
(
wpo_su.option_value,
REPLACE
(
REPLACE
(
REPLACE
(
REPLACE
(
wpo.option_value,
'%year%',
date_format(wpp.post_date,'%Y')
),
'%monthnum%',
date_format(wpp.post_date, '%m')
),
'%day%',
date_format(wpp.post_date, '%d')
),
'%postname%',
wpp.post_name
)
) AS permalink
FROM wp_posts wpp
JOIN wp_options wpo
ON wpo.option_name = 'permalink_structure'
AND wpo.blog_id = 0
JOIN wp_options wpo_su
ON wpo_su.option_name = 'siteurl'
AND wpo_su.blog_id = wpo.blog_id
WHERE wpp.post_type = 'post'
AND wpp.post_status = 'publish'
ORDER BY wpp.post_date DESC
Step 2 - Save it for later:
Now that you have that list dump it into an Excel column for later.
Step 3 - Format it for PHP:
Take all the URLs and dump them into Notepad++ or equivalent. On windows hit cntrl+H to bring up the find/replace function. Make sure to select 'Search Mode' -> 'Extended'
For "Find What" you should put in \r\n and for 'Replace With' you should put in , and hit 'Replace All'.
You should now have a list of all your URLs separated only by a comma.
Step 4 - Create a PHP File:
Create a new PHP file and set:
<?php
$urlString = "http://www.urlsample1.com/article/sony-thing-and-stuff, http://www.urlsample1.com/article/warner-brothers-stuff";
//this will replace the word article with the word product
$newstring = str_replace("article", "product", $urlString);
//turns string into array
$myArray = explode(',', $newstring);
//loops through array to find first case of - and turn it to a /
for ($i = 0; $i < count($myArray); ++$i) {
$haystack = $myArray[$i];
$needle = "-";
$replace = "/";
$pos = strpos($haystack, $needle);
if ($pos !== false) {
$finalstring = substr_replace($haystack, $replace, $pos, strlen($needle));
}
//removes common url elements
$newShort = str_replace("http://www.urlsample1.com", "", $finalstring);
$oldShort = str_replace("http://www.urlsample1.com/product", "/article", $myArray[$i]);
//prints out the old and new url in .htaccess format
print("Redirect 301 " . $oldShort . " " . $newShort . "</br>");
};
?>
Step 5 - .Htaccess
Your output from above should look like:
Redirect 301 /product/sony-thing-and-stuff /product/sony/thing-and-stuff
Redirect 301 /product/warner-brothers-stuff /product/warner/brothers-stuff
and can be put into the .htaccess file.
Note: This method may become slow with Apache and isn't preferable but it is the quickest way I can think of to get your client up and running on the new situation.

Answer 2

For SEO, i suggest you use 301 - redirect in your .htaccess
You can use regexp for redirect.
Example:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/users/(.*)$ http://www.example.com/profiles/$1 [R=301,L]