Redirecting directory - not page.

[michaelbt27]

I've since moved a website from Wordpress to BC. The page 301 redirects work fine. However I'm having difficulty redirecting the "directories."

For instance, Wordpress creates a post - typically something like www.domain.com/2013/03/this-is-my-post/

The issue is there is no extension on the page name. 

What I do not want to do is go and create 100+ fake index pages for BC to recongnize this as a page.

Is there a solution to redictring pages like this. htaccess does not work obviously.

Thanks!

[thetrickster888]

You are going to have to manually create each URL redirect individually- you'll need to recreate all the pages on the old site somewehre on your new site (like blog posts) and once those are ready on your BC site you'll have to redirect them.  You can make redirects to and from pages with or without a URL.

Here's what I suggest-- first, use a Wordpress plugin like http://wordpress.org/plugins/navayan-csv-export/ that will export all your page data to CSV and open that CSV file in Google Docs, Excel or any other spreadsheet program.

On BC there's a way to import all your redirects at once -- if you goto Site Domains > URL Redirects > Import URL Redirects there is a button to download the import file.  Download BC's import file and delete everything in it besides the column names (like instructions and sample data).  Read the instructions first to get familiar with the spreadsheet.  Then, paste the URLs from your wordpress exported CSV file into the "Old URL" column in your BC import spreadsheet.

Now, you have your OLD URLs in one column and need to add your new URLs to the other column before importing back into BC.

The only real way to do this is to download your BC site's sitemap.xml file... it should be at http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.  If this file does not exist and you get a 404 error, there's a hidden page which you can access (not in the BC Admin menus anymore) Just visit this URL: http://yourdomain.com/AdminConsole/#!/Utilities/SEO.aspx

Obviously, replaec yourdomain.com with your BC site domain and on that screen you should re-enable Sitemaps.  It takes up to 24 hours to generate so if it's not there right away after you re-enable sitemap.xml then wait a day.  Now that you have access to your sitemap.xml file you need to save that file by hitting Ctrl-S or Cmd-S in your browser when viewing the sitemap.xml file.

Once your sitemap.xml file is saved locally you can use an online tool to convert that XML data into a CSV file to open as a spreadsheet. I've used http://www.luxonsoftware.com/Converter/xmltoexcel and it works great.  One you download your CSV file from that site and unzip it, open it up and copy just your file with all the URLs.

Copy all the URLs from the sitemap.xml convertd CSV file all at once to a temporary column on your BC import spreadsheet and move them over one-by-one into the New URL column to match the Old URL next to it.

It's going to take some time but that's the quickest way I can think of to get it for all 300+ pages.  You can use whatever URLs you want but you have to manually point each old URL to the new ones and there's no "smart folder redirect".

There is a new feature on BC where if you have a URL called at "/contact-us" and someone visits a URL "/contact" it should find your contact page automatically but I'm not sure that's going to work for your blog posts, etc.

[Scott_TonboDigital]

So, to clarify this:

When setting up redirects from old URLs that use a ../ on the end, like WordPress does, the "old" folder and an index file have to exist on the BC site?

[Creative Bearings]

I very simply created an empty folder with the name I wanted to redirect in File Manager. Then in URL Redirects > Source URL,  specified that same folder from the dropdown, but I also added /index.html to it (Even though there was no index file in that folder). Then selected the page I wanted to forward it to under Destination URL.

Reply to this answer if it works for anyone else too.

Greg