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I run this website www.chalopicnic.com and My development team recently changed the url structure to include hyphen which originally had underscore. This is resulting in NOT FOUND in search engines.

For example when "jet skiing in Mumbai" is searched on Google, the 5th result is

http://chalopicnic.com/more_info.php?tid=373

The change done to the above link is the hyphen

http://chalopicnic.com/more-info.php?tid=373

Is there a way to have the renamed link auto redirected to new link so that I don't loose ranking on Google.

My dev team is unable to find an elegant solution and hence I am seeking help on this.

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Most online web servers will support rewriting of the URL. In Apache this can be done by using a htaccess file and using something like:

RewriteRule (.*)_(.*) $1-$2 [N]

Your find many questions and answers on Stack Overflow regarding converting and rewriting the URL from underscores to hyphens. It's worth mentioning that your development team should of never changed the URL structure before setting up the redirects in advance, by doing so you run the risk of Google dropping the old pages, which means you may lose the authority and rankings gained on the old pages.

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  • is this a long procedure...considering 200-250 pages which needs renaming or it would be a script that would be run across all pages.
    – kartik P
    Sep 20, 2014 at 14:10
  • i am not from development team, so checking if it is time consuming
    – kartik P
    Sep 20, 2014 at 14:18
  • Rewriting _ to - is generally a global one line command and doesn't require anything else. Your dev team should be able to assist, otherwise get someone who can help! (redirects happens to be one of the easiest things to do when web mastering.)
    – Simon Hayter
    Sep 20, 2014 at 18:19

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