.htaccess redirects may conflict with WordPress’s URL structure
Since we updated our site, the location of some pages has moved to a different URL address. Search engines have already indexed these pages to be in the old location, and if it turns up as 404 (missing), my SEO rank will be harmed as they try to find the new URL. The ordinary way to fix this is to use cPanel’s redirects (user interface for Apache’s “.htaccess”). This method sends a 301 (moved permanently) header to the browser or search engine, along with the new address. Apparently that doesn’t leave you completely unharmed in the rankings, but it’s much better than a 404.
My problem with that was that it didn’t work……nope, it did nothing at all. Thankfully, my suspicion was correct: WordPress uses Apache’s “mod_rewrite” to change the URL supplied by the browser to “index.php” on the fly in .htaccess, so all I needed to do was reorder the code to have WordPress’s script come last.
