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I'm overhauling a site to use a new URL structure, but don't want the old URLs to 404, instead redirect to the new content.

To complicate things, this is on a shared host where .htaccess is the only configuration allowed. There are a lot of old URLs, enough that stuffing them all into .htaccess would be a bad move.

I know the RewriteRule directives require FollowSymLinks to be on—does that mean I can make a bunch of symlinks at the locations of the old URLs, that point to their new locations? Would that get Apache to emit a redirect to the new locations?

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No, a symlink is invisible in the URL. It'll show the old URL with the new page, but then you'll have two copies of links.

Can you have the application redirect the URLs? Are there a lot of actual links out there? Or are they just search engine results? You could use canonical links for search engines if you decide to still use symlinks. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

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  • It's a static web server that gets generated offline and uploaded. I might go with both the symlinks and the canonical links if nothing else will work.
    – Tigt
    Oct 28, 2015 at 16:26

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