How to keep sharing stats after creating 301 redirects?

Question

I recently changed a lot of URLs for SEO purposes and realized that all of my Facebook likes and Twitter tweet counts were lost on posts created prior to yesterday. Posts created since yesterday already had SEO-friendly URLs so I didn't have to change them and their social stats are of course, fine.

I used 301 redirects so I can still use the old URL in Facebook and Twitter code since they support indicating another URL to count.I know how to use custom fields in order to fix the old posts, but how do I do this when I have a mix of old posts with new URLs and new posts with unmodified URLs?

Answer 1

Got it.

I was already using the Advanced Custom Fields plugin so I just created a custom field called "old_url" with that.

Then I created a function:

function sharingurl () {
    if(get_field('old_url') == "")
        {
            echo untrailingslashit(get_permalink());
        } else {                    
            echo get_field('old_url');
        }
}

Then I just included <?php sharingurl(); ?> in the data-href and data-counturl for Facebook and Twitter codes respectively.

Note: Facebook does not like trailing slashes, that's why I had to remove it from the permalink.