Redirecting to new URL structure and 301

Question

I had links like example.com/?location=boston on my site. These were indexed by Google. Due to obvious SEO reasons, I had to change the URL structure to example.com/deals/boston. The old URLs are there on Google results and redirect correctly to new URL.

What I want to know is: while doing the redirect, is WordPress also doing a 301 header so that Google can update its indexes or there is something that I am supposed to do?

Basically, I want Google to update its indexes i.e. replace example.com/?location=boston with example.com/deals/boston

Answer 1

Really depends on how your redirects are set up. But you can check the status code using Firebug (or a comparable tool with a request profiler).

Open up the "net" tab in firebug, and hit one of your old URLs. You should** see the request show up at the top of the list, and you'll see the response code in the "status" column. If your redirects are working correctly, the first request will have a status of 301, and will be immediately followed by a second request for your new url, with the status 200.

You coud also do this in Chrome developer tools. The tab you'd use there is titled "Network".

** If your intial request disappears from the list, it probably means that the redirect is being done via JavaScript or some other non-legit method. This method of "redirection" is incapable of returning status codes like 301.

Answer 2

Yes, it does. Here's a simplified listing of the server responses I get after wget-ing a freshly installed copy of WordPress (with permalinks activated).

$ wget -S http://example.com/blog/?p=58
Connecting to example.com (example.com)|xxx.xxx.xxx.xx|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 
  HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
  Date: Fri, 25 May 2012 18:14:19 GMT
  Location: http://example.com/blog/a-post-with-a-left-aligned-image/
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Location: http://example.com/blog/a-post-with-a-left-aligned-image/ [following]
--2012-05-25 21:14:19--  http://example.com/blog/a-post-with-a-left-aligned-image/
Reusing existing connection to example.com:80.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Date: Fri, 25 May 2012 18:14:19 GMT
  ...