How-To Create a 301 Redirect in Magento URL Rewrite Management

I’ve noticed that I’m getting a lot of traffic recently for search queries regarding my previous post on some fairly unimportant details in the process of creating a 301 Permanent redirect using Magento’s URL Rewrite Management. I thought I would take a step back and post a quick how-to:

First: Is the redirect you want to implement at the page (“path”) or domain (“hostname”) level? If you need to redirect any part of the domain, you’ll have to do so somewhere else (like in the .htaccess file of your apache server)

Assuming then that this will be a redirect from one page to another, if I wanted to move and/or rename this page to a new URL, for example:

From: http://thewhatscool.com/seo/how-to-magento-301-redirect.html

To: http://thewhatscool.com/seo/magento-redirect-implementation.html

I would do the following in Magento to create the appropriate pemanent redirect:

1. Navigate to Catalog > Url Rewrite Management
2. Click the “Add Urlrewrite” button
3. Select “Custom” from the “Create Urlrewrite” drop-down menu
4. The “Urlrewrite Information” form would be completed thusly:

ID Path: seo/how-to-magento-301-redirect.html
Request Path: seo/how-to-magento-301-redirect.html
Target Path: http://thewhatscool.com/seo/magento-redirect-implementation.html
Redirect: Permanent(301)

So, to recap:
ID Path and Request path are the same: the path off the root of the url to redirect FROM – everything after (not including) the domain name and trailing slash.
Target path is the URL to redirect TO.

Thanks thewhatscool.com.