Hi,
A while back I uploaded a merchant feed but wrongly named the merchant in my Price Tapestry admin. For example, say the merchant is 'John Lewis', and I wrongly uploaded the feed as 'John Lewish'. This is just a fiction example but you get the idea.
Anyway, along came Google and indexed my site and found a merchant called 'John Lewish'.
Next again week I was refreshing the feed and noticed I'd misspelled the merchant name. So I deleted the merchant and created it again, this time with the correct spelling.
Then a couple of weeks later I noticed in my Google Analytics stats that I was getting a bit of search traffic for the term 'John Lewish' - perhaps Sean Connery was in town looking for a new kilt!
and the Google listings link to these pages:
mysite.co.uk/shopping/merchant/johnlewish/
mysite.co.uk/shopping/merchant/johnlewish/2.html
So, I was thinking, is it possible for me to capitalise on this by sending this traffic to:
[a] custom page with a big John Lewis link on it; or even better
[b] redirect to merchant through my affiliate link somehow?
Ok, that sounds promising. Would this work:
RewriteRule ^merchant/johnlewish/(.*)$ http://www.affiliatelink.co.uk [L,R=301]where,
I just redirect straight to merchant through affiliate link. You see, I think these searchers are just looking for the merchant so it would be most effective to just redirect straight to merchant
Hi Neil,
I think that should be safe enough; a search engine will see the "moved permanently" link and then drop the original URL from its database; ignoring the new URL as it would only index / be interested in the new URL under it's normal rules of discovery.
Cheers,
David.
Hi David,
Is this the exact code I should use:
RewriteRule ^merchant/johnlewish/(.*)$ http://www.affiliatelink.co.uk [L,R=301]apart from the URL which I'll need to change of course.
Also, it's the .htaccess in main PT folder I need to change right?
Many thanks,
Neil
Hi Neil,
Looks fine - should do the trick. Yes - it's .htaccess in the main .pt folder. Once it's in place test it by finding one of the incorrect links in a search engine and checking it redirects as expected...
Cheers,
David.
Hi David,
Just a quick update on this one. It works great and is bringing me some nice commissions now!!
Best,
Neil
Hi Neil,
If you have got lots of pages indexed for a mis-spelling I would add a line to .htaccess to issue a 301 (moved permanently) to the correct version, for example, as the first rule - so immediately after:
RewriteBase /...add:
RewriteRule ^merchant/johnlewish/(.*)$ merchant/johnlewis/$1 [L,R=301]Search engines (in general) will update their internal database when encountering a 301 (Moved Permanently) redirect. Either way; it will mean that you can still use the traffic coming to the mis-spelled pages.
Cheers,
David.