A bit of backstory is needed to hopefully clarify. I have a site that sells from its category pages (and has done it that way successfully for years). There hadn't been any accessible links to the products until about 7 months ago. Then it was decided to link to the product pages even though they were void of good content (the intention was to build out the info). Then an SEO company got involved and didn't think the empty pages would be beneficial and requested these pages be 301 redirected back to the category. I figured that using the built-in URI Management would be the best way to go. In hindsight, it may have been a huge mistake. When the built-in URI Management redirects, it deletes what was seen as the product canonical. When that happens, the product links revert back to the old long-style links. Then when the site gets spidered for a sitemap or by Google it picks up the long style links. Of course, that has driven the SEO company nuts because it was finding both short and long links in Google instead of all the short style links. The real problem becomes the inability for the redirect to truly work as it was intended. With the short-style links no longer being found what is the point of the redirect? In the meantime, the only way to keep Google from finding the long-style links was to put a noindex in place.
Is there no way to keep the short links and redirect them without writing a massive .htaccess file?
Is there no way to keep the short links and redirect them without writing a massive .htaccess file?
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