Just wondering if its possible to 301 redirect an existing Rewriterule?
For example if I have the following line in my .htaccess file :
RewriteRule ^blue-widgets/ bluewidgets.php
and then I need to change my URL structure but the url “blue-widgets/” has a good ranking in the search engines which I dont wont to lose, is it possible to add another rewrite rule (301) that redirects that url too “newdirectory/blue-widgets/” ? If so, how is this done, is it a simple case of adding the new rewriterule under the existing one?
Does the fact that you have 2 rewrites, slow the page down or have any other problems?
You are confusing two quite different aspects: internal and external rewrites.
301 and 302 are external rewrites and in effect pass the redirect instruction back to the user’s browser to do. 301 tells the browser (and the search engines) that the address change is permanent.
Rewrite rules without the [R] flag do an internal redirect — that is a remapping inside the Apache / IIS subsystem than is not exposed to the outside world.
Yes, you can have multiple URI internally redirecting to the same target, but as you’ve written them, they will not be external and not 301s.