Magento URL rewrite from SEO friendly URL's to new store

Question

I have a new domain and am trying to 301 all of the old products/categories/pages from the old site to the relevant pages on the new site. Some of the URL's have changed slightly so doing this through .htaccess as a whole domain would not really work.

I have tried doing this in batch through phpmyadmin and testing it on individual urls through Magento's url rewrite in the admin panel. The error message I am getting is “Request Path for Specified Store already exists” which makes sense because the SEO friendly URL is already being used by the system rewrite. (see image below)

The only way I can get this to work is:

• SEO URL's enabled
• Change the redirect of the system URL rewrite thats added automatically when enabling SEO URL's to 301 (see the image)
• Then create a custom URL rewrite from the ugly URL (oldurl.com/catalog/product/view/id/2881/category/47) to the new domain url (example.com/monitor) and set this to 301 redirect.

But it does not feel like the best way and does a double redirect still pass link juice?

What I want to do is:

• SEO URL's enabled
• Add URL redirect from the SEO friendly url (oldurl.com/themonitor) that goes directly to the new site (example.com/monitor) as a 301

Answer 1

I would do this in two stages:

1. At the web server level 301 redirect all requests for the old domain to the same path on the new domain.

   For example to redirect all requests from the old domain to the new domain using Apache, in the virtualhost config for the old domain:

   Redirect permanent / http://www.newdomain.com/

2. Utilise the Magento redirects so that requests for the old URLs are redirected to the new ones. This is standard Magento functionality, assuming that you changed the URL's by editing them in Magento and kept the "Create Permanent Redirect for old URL" box checked.

This means a request would go like this:

olddomain.com/catalog/product/view/id/2881/category/47
        ↓
web server redirect
        ↓
newdomain.com/catalog/product/view/id/2881/category/47
        ↓
magento redirect
        ↓
newdomain.com/monitor