301 redirects and writing to .htaccess

[freakystreak]

Not sure if this can be done but.... what I would like to achieve is have Redirect 301 addresses in my .htaccess file updated automatically. I currently use the SEO friendly Urls Pro app and while it does a great job changing the urls, i still have to manually update my .htaccess file with a 301 redirect for the changes to take full effect. Tried to find any way of creating this method but as yet not seen anything that would work. Is this possible?

[Jack_mcs]

I'm not sure I understand your question. The url rewriter, if installed correctly, will issue 301's for any category, product and manufacturer. If you want to issue a 301 for some other page then you need to add a line for it. But you should need to keep changing them no mater the page, assuming the page's url doesn't change.

[freakystreak]

Sorry, I'll try to explain better... The addon creates the alias but I have to reset the cache through the app. This does indeed change the URL but if there is a listing on Google then Google willl use the old URL rather than the new alias. So, for example I want to have the  URL as /my-product.html but my Google listing has /this-is-my-product.html. Unless I manually change my .htaccess file with a 301 redict, then google will class the page /my-product.html as a 404-page cannot be found. What I would like is a way for the 301 redirect to be automatically added to my .htaccess file, so I don't need to manually add redirects. Hope this makes more sense.

[Jack_mcs]

That's how the redirect addons work. The non-rewrtten url is something like ...com/product_info.php?product_id=123 The rewriters replaces that with the rewritten url and issues a 301 for the non-rewritten url. At least, that is how the Ultimate SEO and SEO 5 addons work.

The text part of the url is taken from the product name. It should not have an affect on the links in the search engines. That is, if google has a link for productA.html and your site has myproductA.html, the url rewriter should find the correct page. Again, for the two addons mentioned above.

If I were you I would first figure out what google is listing the same product with a different name. If you have a google sitemap addon installed, which you should, then see if it has the urls that match google or your site. It might be that that addon, if it exists, isn't compatible with the rewriter you are using.