301 Redirect for Page Name Changes

Sorry for not replying sooner, I fell asleep!

From what I've read about a 310 redirect .htaccess file, the old page name is only the path beyond the root directory. The new page name contains the entire path. So would the .htaccess file look like this:

Redirect 301 /Photo-Gallery/Pages/Scanned.html http://www.capecodupholstery.com/Photo-Gallery/Pages/scanned.html

Wyodor - I copy and pasted your code and put it in my pages folder. For some reason it broke the page. To the left of the 2011 Album should be a 2012 Album. Also I lost the Scanned Album which is at the bottom of the Gallery Page, which is not in the screenshot.

I have 5 pages in my site I would like to change the names to. Ideally I would like to have one .htaccess file located in the root directory with all 5 redirects. I know it can be done, just can't figure out the correct paths.

The reason I'm doing this is because I started my iWeb site many many years ago before I knew about proper paths for a URL. I'm seeing a developing problem if I want to use a new App to rebuild my iWeb site and use the same page names. I have things like page names with capital letters and spaces between words. The apps I've worked with so far want to reformat capital letters to small cap and spaces to hyphens instead of underscores. So my thinking is to start by changing the page names before I have issues later on.

Wyodor wrote:

The photo gallery page looks okay to me :

http://www.capecodupholstery.com/Photo-Gallery/Photo-Gallery.html

And there is no Scanned.html (Uppercase S) file to redirect :

I deleted the .htaccess file from the pages folder, as I didn't want to leave the page broken. So you probably looked at it after I deleted it. And yes, there is no /Scanned.html because I changed the name to scanned. I thought the purpose of the 301 redirect was to let Google know that if they've indexed that page as "Scanned" to go directly to "scanned" instead. That way Google doesn't think the page is empty. Is that the way it works.

Should I re-upload the .htaccess file for you see what I mean.

Roddy wrote:

When uploaded to the server, this will overwrite the original "Scanned.html" file and redirect visitors to the new "scanned.html".

Roddy, I think is where the problem is. I do not still have the original "Scanned.html" file. The original Scanned page was changed to scanned and published. So I only have the one "scanned.html" file on the server.

Wyodor,

I did what you said and although it does work in the sense that you no longer reach a dead link, which is good, but doing it that way still leaves the URL saying "Scanned and not "scanned". A few of the pages I want to change the names to have been indexed by Google for at least 10 years with the same name. Partly why my site site pages consume a whole page of search results.

So the pages I'm most concerned about changing the names to are the ones that are currently indexed. That's why I thought a permanent redirect was the way to go to get Google indexing the new page names right away. That's how it worked when I changed Domain names a few years ago. I went from (joegramm.com) to (capecodupholstery.com) and left all the page names the same. I used a permanent redirect .htaccess file to redirect one domain to the other. It was amazing to see the new domain being re-indexed starting within a few days.

Thanks, I went to the page about removing an entire page from Google search result, which I will do, but not until the newer page with the name change get's indexed.

I've actually had success in an unexpected way. On my web server (Host Excellence) Control Panel, there is a URL Redirect panel. In there at the Server level, I was easily ably to set up a Permanent URL Redirect. It is not the same as doing a 301 Redirect .htaccess file, but HE assures me(?) that google will find the redirect in the control panel. The results are the same though, as far as the URL. I don't have or want the scanned page indexed. So I changed a page name that I do have indexed at Google and used the Server redirect for that. I changed the name from Resume > resume. Now if you go to Resume, the URL has "resume". http://www.capecodupholstery.com/Resume.html (Don't Laugh) Just what I wanted. So now with the Page Redirect and new sitemap.xml, I should be good to go.

For some reason the Resume link above is not working on my end. Does that link work for others. I can use that link in a bwoser, email and other places and it works. But for some reason the above link does not include the .html at the end when I click the link. Trying it here again, sorry. http://www.capecodupholstery.com/Resume.html

Going nuts !!