Using the Redirect Manager in Joomla 3.1

Joomla 3.0 includes a component named Redirect Manager. The Redirect Manager helps you identify URLs that your visitors are accessing that don’t actually exist, pages that return a 404 not found status.

Know your 404 pages

It is important to eliminate 404 pages for several reasons, two of them being:

1. Usability – You may have visitors trying to reach a popular page of yours that either has been deleted or moved, and you have the potential of losing readers if they can’t find what it is they’re looking for.
2. Search Engine Optimization – Search engines expect for websites to move pages around or delete them. Having an excessive number of these types of pages however may cause some search engines to penalize your site.

How to Redirect pages with the Redirect Manager

The Redirect manager in Joomla 3.0 allows you to see what URLs users are accessing on your site that don’t exist. For example, on our Joomla 3.0 website, the following URL does not exist: https://domain.com/this-page/does-not/exist

When we access that page, the Redirect Manager will log the for us the fact that someone visited that URL and got a 404 page. It will also give us the ability to automatically redirect users that visit that URL to another page, such as /index.php/7-my-first-blog-post. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to do just that.

To redirect a page with the Joomla 3.0 Redirect Manager:

1. Log into your Joomla 3.0 Admin Dashboard
2. In the top menu, click Components and then click Redirect
3. 

   On this page you will see a list of bad URLs that Joomla has logged for you. Click the URL that you would like to setup a redirect for.
4. There are a few things you can input for this redirect, but we will enter only the essentials, the Destination URL and Status.

   
   

   Destination URL

   Enter here the URL to be redirected to.

   In our testing, we entered https://domain.com/index.php/7-my-first-blog-post as the destination URL.

   Status
   Set publication status.

   Change status from Disabled to Enabled.

   After entering the full URL to redirect to and updating the status, click Save in the top left of the page.

   Now you can test your new redirect! In our testing, when we go to:
   https://domain.com/this-page/does-not/exist
   …we are automatically redirected to:
   https://domain.com/index.php/7-my-first-blog-post