If you’re using sh404SEF, then, first, we feel sorry for you! But second, we have good news!
We have created a script that allows you to batch change links in sh404SEF. For example, say you have 5,000 links on your website that contain the pattern my-products/, and say you want to change my-products/ to products/ while ensuring that your old links still work. Here’s what you’ll have to do:
- Change the category (or the menu item) alias from my-products to products.
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Flush all the sh404SEF links.
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Go through 5,000 links that have products/ in them, and then add the appropriate alias. For example, for the link http://www.yourjoomlawebsite.com/products/, you will need to add http://www.yourjooomlawebsite.com/my-products/ as an alias. You must do this to ensure that your old links still work and redirect to the new links. A much more expedient way of fixing the problem is by adding a rule in your .htaccess file to redirect anything that has my-products/ to products/, but it’s always better to avoid making changes in your .htaccess file unless you can’t do them at the Joomla level. (We’ve seen .htaccess files that are illegible.)
As you can see, the process for massively changing links and ensuring that the old links redirect to the new ones in a 301 redirect is not straightforward and can take a lot of time especially if you go with it the manual way (instead of doing it in the .htaccess file). But, if you use our script, then all you need to do is the following:
- Extract the zipped PHP file to he root directory of your website.
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Open that PHP file and change the values of $changeFrom and $changeTo to your values (in our example above, $changeFrom should be my-products/ and $changeTo should be products/).
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Point your browser to http://www.yourjoomlawebsite.com/changesh404SEFLinks.php. Once you see the word “Done!”, then it means all your links are changed, and your old links are 301 redirected to the new ones. Congratulations!
Some notes:
- This script is designed to work on Joomla 2.5, but it might work on 3.x with little or no modification. We haven’t tested it on Joomla 3.x yet.
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Running the script more than once accidentally should not harm the website.
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You should backup your website before running the script. We are not responsible for any direct/indirect issues on your website caused by the script.
We hope our post helped! If you have issues running the script, then please contact us. We’ll be more than happy to help for a very reasonable fee!