Another 301 Redirect Question

Greetings,

I’ve been redesigning a rather large site for the past few months and launch time is right around the corner. The old page was relatively well positioned and I’d like to take all the possible steps to ensure we try and keep that ranking. Everything I have read has lead me to believe that 301 redirects are the best way to do this, however the page now spans 4 languages and over 800 pages. While the first problem is that yes, that’s going to take me forever to compile, my real question is whether or not adding in 800 lines to my .htaccess is going to effect anything else! Has anyone done anything like this before?

I’m using friendly URL’s, is having that much stuff above that rewrite rule going to effect that in any way?

I’m guess I’m just nervous to go throwing that much stuff into .htaccess, is there any way around that?

Any help or anecdotes would be greatly appreciated.

Keep in mind how the .htaccess file works... each time apache handles a page request, it looks through the contents of that file... so if you have 800 lines of redirects in there, you should expect your webserver performance to suffer. But maybe that’s just the cost of preserving your SEO rankings.

You may be able to write a redirect rule that uses pattern matching to accomplish what you need using a single rule. You should post some examples here as for what the old and new versions of the urls are.

Writing regular expressions for redirects can be tricky, but if you do it correctly, they can be immensely powerful -- in this case, it might save you the trouble of writing 800 lines.

Personally, I just create a db table or php array I can include from file that contains all of the original URI’s and the new URI’s. Then you simply create a plugin registered OnPageNotFound and have it search the list and redirect when you match an original URI.