Steven

Thank you, @theguitarlesson, for writing up your experience and lessons learned. I had intended to make my switch to SSL right after the start of the year. However, it has been delayed. I’m getting ready to do it now. So it’s really nice to read how it went for you and how you resolved issues along the way.

Just to be clear, though, with respect to Facebook’s instructions ( https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler#updating ), it will work if you follow the two steps to the letter, right?

1. Exempt the Facebook crawler from your HTTP redirect
— It looks like you’ve done this. Also, this requires you to keep every old URL alive with a page or post with og:url tag pointing to itself.

2. Use the old page as the canonical URL for the new page
— In this case, the page or post at each new URL must include an og:url tag that points to the corresponding old URL.

According to Facebook, following these two steps should result in the share count at the new URL reflecting the combined share totals from both the old and new. Is that what finally ended up working for you?

What’s the preferred method for adding all of these og:url tags? Clearly, only 301 redirected posts/pages will need to have the old/new pairs of og:url tags. New posts/pages won’t need them. So it looks to me like each pair of redirected posts/pages will need to have custom, individual og:url tags inserted.

Thanks again for the great article!

• This reply was modified 9 years, 2 months ago by Steven.

Thanks, Jeremy. I was planning to put the redirection into .htaccess directly. The info at the stackoverflow link looks promising. Thanks for the pointer to it.

Thank you for this information and for the link to the Facebook documentation. Could you show an example of how to write the instruction in .htaccess to exempt the Facebook crawler from a 301 direct? I’ve not found a way to do this properly.

The Facebook solution also calls for using og:url tags in the old and new pages. What’s the best way to implement this in WordPress?

In my case, rather than having URL changes because of a switch to SSL, I want to combine two WordPress installations One is in a subdomain. I want to import the blog posts from the subdomain into the main site’s WordPress installation, eliminate the subdomain, and use the 301 redirects to point to the new URLS for the posts moved out of the subdomain. I eventually also would like to go to SSL but am not ready to do that yet.

Thanks!