I am really hoping this is the right location to figure this out!
For starters, I am a newly hired webmaster for my company. We specialize in selling power supplies that have a variety of models and has a huge database on SQL or phpMyAdmin I think these are one in the same no? Such as phpMyAdmin is a SQL database? -Moving on. Our website is an ecommerce page that has product pages and categories.
The link would be something like this domain/ac-dc-power-supplies/lpv-60-12
This is generally the syntax or path for all of the products however, Somewhere along the lines while I was creating categories. I accidentally changed the category to “suppies” minus the “L.” So what happened is when I saved this category, all of the products changed their links to now “domain/ac-dc-power-suppies/lpv-60-12” which as you know destroyed my SEO and made all of my links dead.
In a rush I tried to figure out what the heck I was doing as I am very novice level with web development/design. So I went into the Magento interface (CMS) and changed my category back to the ac-dc-power-supplies url path. After saving this setting with the L BACK in the path, my table was recreated with almost every product had a “-1” at the end to make up for duplicates. Being that I did not know how to erase all “-1” from every link, I had to truncate my table and reindex the table through the CMS. Naturally, this destroyed all my links- and re-directs. Now I have 10k plus 404 errors daily from old links that had an .html at the end. The best solution to me would be able to take the old table (I did back the table up before truncating) and remove all of the “-1” from every path, then after this, take all of the “.html” path endings and make them work for both non .html links and .html links.
My questions are. If you know about anything I mentioned above, Help would be GREAT!
If all else fails, I at least would like to just keep the table I re-indexed with no .html links and add a re-direct for every link to have .html links re-direct to non .html links or visa versa.
For example:
domain/ac-dc-power-supplies/led-power-supplies/lpv-60-12
domain/ac-dc-power-supplies/led-power-supplies/lpv-60-12.html
both point to either:
domain/ac-dc-power-supplies/led-power-supplies/lpv-60-12
or
domain/ac-dc-power-supplies/led-power-supplies/lpv-60-12.html
Would the .html link be preferred to increase SEO? or should I redirect links to .html and just add .html to all links in the table.
I hope this wasn’t extremely confusing and someone out there knows what I’m talking about, so far I have had no answers to any of my threads.