Changing the url structure of established site?

Question

Just a quick question regarding the URL (template) structures in expression engine.

I have an established site that has been live for almost a year. I was brand new to EE when I set up and therefore I am finding better ways of building the site all the time.

I have a template group and set of templates like so

template_group/template/

walks/find/
walks/findwalk/
walks/view/
walks/search/

obviously walks/view/ is is my single entry template.

walks/find/ is my main listing template. This includes a list of all the latest entries, together with a search box.

walks/findwalk/ is exactly the same as the find template, but it displays results from categories, so the url ends up something like walks/findwalk/category/(catergoryname)

walks/search/ is the same again, except it contains my search results.

I know, not very DRY, but I was new.

So I am looking at simplifying it slightly and condensing the templates down. The way I see it, I would be quite happy to have single page view separate, and a single template for the listing page.

I have just started using Switchee, and I think this would be good here.

Ideally my listing template would be walks/find/ which, by using switchee, would check for {segment_3}

walks/find/search
walks/find/category
walks/find/

So that's fine. Nicer URL's, less templates. However, I am a bit unsure as to how this will effect my current search results in search engines.

By far, the url thats hit on most is walks/find/, so that will stay the same, but then nearly all the next most hit urls are: walks/findwalk/category/(category_name)

What will happen to these results in google? Is there a way to ensure the links stay active?

Sorry for the long post!

EDIT:

Just realised I'm not even using the index template within the template group, so i could clean these urls up a bit further but dropping the need for find altogether.

walks/search
walks/category
walks/
walks/(entry_title)

This would look a lot better. Just wondering if there is a way to drop the category at all? This would mean i could get walks/category_name/entry_title which would look better still!

Answer 1

You'll want to add 301 redirects to your .htaccess file, with the old URLs mapped to the new URLs.

You can parameterize those redirects, so you can match on /walks/findwalk/category/[value] and have it insert that value in your new URL structure.

You'll want to Google '301 redirects htaccess' for pointers. I've also found Perishable Press to be a good htaccess resource in the past.

Specifying 301 (permanent) redirects will instruct Google to update its index, with the new URL as the permanent, new location for that content.

Updated: If you want to omit the /category/ segment, you'll need conditionals to catch the other segments and handle those. If one of those cases is not met, you can assume a category ID or category url_title, and branch your logic to present results accordingly. At that point you're using your index template as a router, and routing the request to embed templates based on the values on the URL. You would need to do a lookup on segment_2 to see if there were any entry matches. If not, you'd need to bounce to an embedded template to look up category matches for segment_2.

Maybe just use a word other than 'category' for segment_2 rather than complicate your templates?

Updated: As suggested in the comments, Detour Pro looks like it will cover all of the 301 redirect goals, though I haven't personally used it.