Redirecting old Sitemaps to a new XML

[IgorMateski]

I've discovered a ton of 404s from Google's WMT crawler looking for mydomain.com/sitemap_archive_MONTH_YEAR. There are tons of these monthly archive xmls. I've used a plugin that for some reason created individual monthly archive xml sitemaps and now I get 404s. Creating rules for each archive seems a bad solution. My current sitemap plugin creates a single clean one mydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml.

How can I create a redirect rule in the Redirection WP plugin that will redirect any URL that has the 'sitemap' and 'xml' string in it to my current xml sitemap?

I've tried using a wildcard like so: mysite.com/sitemap*.*, mysite.com/sitemap ., mysite.com/sitemap(.), mysite.com/sitemap (.) but none of the wildcard uses got the general redirect to work. Is there a way to make this happen with the WP Redirection plugin? If not, is there a htaccess rule, and what would the code be for it? Im not very fluent with using general redirects in htaccess unfortunately. Thanks!

[DennisSeymour]

Hi! Yeah, that's what i said. I would just ignore it and mark as fixed. Just be sure you crawl the whole site so that you dont have the old one linked on some page on your site.

[IgorMateski]

Hey there!

The 404s are from Webmaster tools. It's the sitemap xml files that are missing. But Google is still looking for them. So if Google looks for the non-existant xmls, is this a big deal, or should I just ignore it since the new sitemap is already in WMT and there's no problem with crawling/indexing the site.

Thanks bud.

[DennisSeymour]

Hi again Igor!

Those pages do not exist anymore right?

If you load them, they just show a 404? That's how I understand this since you moved to using a different plugin.

If your site's 404 page is optimized then, in my case, I would just mark them all as fixed and wouldn't bother with them.

I'll also make sure no other page is linking to those dead links.

As an alternative, I would export them, then do a redirect to the homepage. It'll bog you down if it's a lot so it's my last choice.

Hope that helps