Need to redirect Wordpress category archives

Question

I recently changed my Wordpress category structure a bit, changing some of the names and placing some under different parent categories.

I don't use category name in my post URLs, so that's not a problem. But my category archive pages are indexed and have page rank I don't want to lose.

So I need to redirect: "/category/old_cat_name" to "/category/new_cat_name".
Or in some cases to /new_cat_name/new_sub_cat. I gather that I can't do this though the WP Redirection plugin and that I have to modify my .htaccess.

Can someone show me what lines to add there--or is there another better way to do this? Thanks.

Answer 1

You'll need to write a rule for each category so I hope you don't have a lot. But the basic syntax would be like this:

redirect 301 /category/old_cat_name_1 /category/new_cat_name
redirect 301 /category/old_cat_name_2 /new_cat_name/new_sub_cat