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EE gives clients great control over the url_title of the entry. This is great for publishing new entries, and necessary for editing entries in case of mistakes or any other "good" reason to change the url_title.

Being an SEO conscience developer who runs an EE site, when I change a url_title for an entry that has been published and indexed by Google, I set up a 301 Redirect using .htaccess, so previous users and search engines know where the new page lives.

Clients will not do this, of course. Without me telling them, they will simply change the url_title as they see fit. I believe this is something they should be able to do without contacting someone who knows about 301 Redirects. This is something that is handled automatically by WordPress (based on a limited understanding and experience with WordPress).

Are there any plugins or techniques out there that will accomplish this task you are aware of?

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The Detour Pro addon should do what you need.

Detour Pro handles simple redirects like this/old/page to this/new/page

The PathFinder addon seems like it will add redirects automatically.

Configure ExpressionEngine to automatically perform an HTTP 301 redirect when the URL slug (url_title) for an entry is changed.

Want to allow content editors to change URL slugs for SEO purposes or to match changes in entry titles, without losing existing search engine ranking as a result of changing the URL, and without needing a developer to setup a redirect? This add-on can help.

Requires initial setup by someone competent with PHP.

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    Thank you for the suggestion. I have looked into Detour Pro. Based on the documentation, it seems that it would allow a user to manually redirect using 301 or 302 a page which fulfills the "no knowledge of 301 Redirects" requirement (sort of). The problem is, it does not automatically setup redirects for the user once they change the url_title. Unfortunately, this is the primary concern for my question. Certainly, it will suffice if there is no alternative. Perhaps, I will think about commissioning this functionality, and open-sourcing it. Thanks :)
    – Jarrod
    Jan 23, 2013 at 17:27
  • I've edited my answer and added a second addon...
    – Anna_MediaGirl ♦
    Jan 23, 2013 at 19:12
  • Thanks for the suggestion. That's an EE1 solution that could possibly be ported. I will look into this a bit more.
    – Jarrod
    Jan 24, 2013 at 2:26
  • Ooops. Didn't notice that.
    – Anna_MediaGirl ♦
    Jan 24, 2013 at 3:22
  • I hate to abandon ship on this one, but it seems like a difficult concept. Because of the freedom EE gives you with channel entries, there doesn't seem to be a way to accomplish this without limiting EE's flexibility (a channel entry, can exist in many place/urls). Perhaps someone with some more EE chops will think of a solution for this. Certainly an idea for an add-on that would be useful for clients.
    – Jarrod
    Jan 29, 2013 at 3:03

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