If you've changed menu items or aliases on your website, the old links will still be indexed on Google until it gets back around to checking them again. This means that if someone is linked to your website in Google and it gives them an old link, they will get a 404 error and won't be able to view anything.
This is where redirecting comes in. We need to redirect all the old links to the new ones to ensure a viewer still gets to the correct page. This can be done individually but can take hours - this is where we can utilise a batch redirect to speed up our process. This basically enables you to take any links with a certain alias and point it to a new alias.
Here is what a default Joomla htaccess file looks like:
To add our redirects, we must ensure we put them before the Joomla SEF rewrites which is generally the last part of the file. See below how you can rewrite a URL.
This basically tells anything that has blog/blog-category-1 in it to redirect to the URL blog/blog-category-2. so the url withblog/blog-category-1/sub-category/item-to-view will automatically update toblog/blog-category-2/sub-category/item-to-view
Below is where we need to add this into our htaccess file - just before the SEF rewrites.
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