How to do redirection in Wordpress

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I just read a blog entry on John Chow dot com about Text-Link-Ad and their recent change of their affiliate links. I checked my email and I received the same email. Mine was addressed to Dax. Unfortunately I don’t receive John’s email or affiliate checks!

Dax,

As a Text Link Ads affiliate we’re pleased to let you know that we’ve
begun using tinyurl.com to shorten and secure our affiliate referral
links. We encourage you to update your affiliate links using the
following:

Homepage URL
–
http://tinyurl.com/2ovj28

Starter Promo URL
–
http://tinyurl.com/363e4o

** Please note that our old affiliate urls will no longer work in one
week so please update today. Thank you!

Tinyurl is a service you can use to shorten URL’s such as http://www.daxdesai.com/Aug/08/SomePost.html into http://tinyurl.com/8slkj3 for example.

The problem with this change is that everywhere I may have used the original URL, I will have to change it to the new address. My old links will break.

What’s the Solution to URL Changes?

Redirection.

Redirection tells the web server - When I am asked to serve up website x with addres http://theoldadddress.html take him to http://newaddress.html instead. In this way the links do not break and your reader can still get to the sites as you intended them to.

How to Redirect in Wordpress Blogs

I’ve found a great plug-in to handle redirection. The plug-in is at urbangiraffe.com aptly called redirection.

Below is an example of the redirect interface:

Here are some of its features per their website:

• Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes
• Manually add 301, 302, and 307 redirections for a WordPress post, or for any other file
• Full regular expression support
• Apache .htaccess is not required - works entirely inside WordPress
• Strip or add www to all your WordPress pages
• Redirect index.php, index.html, and index.htm access
• Redirection statistics telling you how many times a redirection has occurred, when it last happened, who tried to do it, and where they found your URL
• Fully localized

If you find the plug-in useful drop him a donation. This is a great time-saving plug-in and I highly recommend it. If you don’t have direct access to your apache.access then this is a great way to take the mystery out of redirection and use Wordpress completely to handle your redirects.