Turning Broken URLs Into Search Terms?

Question

I'm migrating a Typepad install to a Wordpress subdomain, and most of the links will be broken. The rewrites work so that:

http://mainsite.com/blogs

is rewritten to

http://blogs.mainsite.com

If a full link with article information is passed, it is rewritten as such;

http://mainsite.com/blogs/2014-13-7/article-title.html

to

http://blogs.mainsite.com/2014-13-7/article-title.html

I am looking for a way to feed the article title into Wordpress's search so even though the link is broken, it is easy for users with bookmarks find it.

Answer 1

You can try a plugin to do this:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/smart-404/

Reads the page URL and tries to find a page/post that it might match and redirect to it.

Found out about this plugin from: http://www.aebeta.com/web-hosting/seo/7-seo-friendly-404-plugin-for-wordpress.html

Answer 2

Why not do a one-to-one redirect? When migrating the data over, add a custom field like '_legacy_url' in the WXR or whatever mechanism you're using to track the old URLs. Then, check during the template_redirect action for a one-to-one match whenever WP throws a 404.

add_action('template_redirect', 'typepad_redirects', 0);
function typepad_redirects(){
    if(is_404()){
        global $wpdb, $wp;
        $url = esc_attr($wp->request);
        $result = $wpdb->get_row("SELECT * FROM $wpdb->postmeta WHERE meta_key = '_legacy_url' AND meta_value LIKE '%$url%'");
        $redirect_url = get_permalink($result->post_id);
        if($redirect_url){
             wp_redirect($redirect_url, 301);
             die();
        }
    }
}