Joomla redirect manager doesn't redirect when there are params in url

Question

We've recently transfered a huge site to joomla. It has two languages; english and german.

There is a twitter account which has links to the previous site.

These links look like this:

[site]/de/news/nc/article/[article-alias]

On the new site we have set up redirects from these urls (manually) to the new urls, for example:

[newsite]/de/[menuitem]/news/[article-alias]

(the new article-alias differs from the old one, as the titles changed)

Now, for some reason, when a user clicks on the (german) twitter link he gets redirected to the frontpage and two new lines show up in the redirect manager:

[newsite]/de/news/nc/article/[article-alias]?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter [newsite]/en/news/nc/article/[article-alias]?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

I have no idea why the system does this. Setting up redirects automatically is no option.

Any ideas as to why params at the end of the url don't get redirected, and why there is also an english line in there? (the twitter link is to the german version

Answer 1

Sadly Joomla is very weak at handling redirects and one of the promises in Joomla 3 that SEO would be a lot easier and far better, while version 3 is better it's still not nailed SEO out of the box and extensions remain the best for SEO. From personal experience I know the redirect manager does not always work as intended and your best of saving your time and installing a proper manager within a SEO extension.

If you was to ask this on the Joomla forum you can expect the same response.. Sadly.

I suggest you take a look at these Joomla extensions:

• SH404SEF

• AceSEF

AceSEF Basic does the trick but if you have the money then SH404SEF is by far the best out of the 2 but may have more options than you need.