Redirecting tens of thousands of links

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Liam Morgan: Hi just a quick one that id like a second opinion on.  ;
  I am redirecting tens of thousands of links that are all unique URLs so rather than manually redirect every single link, which would take weeks, I have created a regular expression script that matches on all of these URLs and pushes them to the relevant content pages.
  
  However these ;relevant content pages do not have the correct name within the URL (which isn't possible to get using the regex script).
  So I want to a add a  ;"Rel canonical" to these pages pointing to the correctly named url version. ;
  
  Can anyone see any issues with that? ;or with using a rel canonical for 50,000+ pages from a redirect?
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  Federico Sasso: I think it's sensible, a good second-best solution
• 
  Liam Morgan: I thought it might be alright but there were a few thing I was unsure on how it would behave such as would Google disregard all the canonicals because of mass ;canonicalation or redirecting?
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  Federico Sasso: would Google disregard all the canonicals because of mass canonicalation or redirecting?
  
  Not really, since they all point - if I understood correctly - to their own unique URL.
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  Liam Morgan: That is correct they will all point to a unique URL I was thinking more for the sheer number of canonicals. Thank you for your guidance +Federico Sasso ; ;
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  Juchel De Leon: If in case you're redirecting your pages on the relevant url that would be fine. Are you redirecting the pages with the same content in it?.just to be sure?
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  Liam Morgan: Id like to add a ;canonical rather than another redirect to protect some of its ranking ability but yes the content will be the same from site A to B ;
  
  I've tried to simplify my process below:
  
  Site A has 80,000+ articles
  
  Site A is to be closed for Site B.
  
  Site A articles (/article/name/id/number.article) are redirected to Site B (/article/type/temp/id/number) displaying same relevant content.
  
  I want to add 80,000+ canonicals from Site Bs redirected URL (seen above) to prettier ;(/article/type/name/id/number) to remove "temp" for article name.
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  Juchel De Leon: Thats perfectly fine. Let me check the link of google webmaster hangout that i attented about this matter. So you can have a solid proof.
• 
  Edwin Jonk: I would still keep the old site verified in Google's search console. Namely to check for bad links. That is, if a specific article is targetted by NSEO, I would try to get it out of the 301 re-direct to the new site. And the old site can have its own disavow list.
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  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:11:33 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/redirecting_tens_of_thousands_of_links +Liam Morgan
  
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• 
  Tony “Tiggerito” McCreath: RewriteMap may provide you with an alternate solution. It lets you use a lookup table for your Rewrites:
  
  http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/rewrite/rewritemap.html
  
  Or you could write some custom code to run on all requests and look up the redirect mappings in a database. That would scale best.
• 
  Liam Morgan: Ha ha I seem to have caused quite the confusion during the video and I apologies.
  Tim just on the off change you see this I wish I could do a 1-1 redirect to the finished URLs but the regex method I'm using to captcha the many article URLs ,when the site is moved, will only send the matched group of articles to a single URL, which using PHP will show the unique content based off id but the page has temp within the URL hence the idea of a canonical to the "prettier" named one. ;
  
  Thank you for your support everyone! I believe I'm OK now.
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  Jim Munro: +Tim Capper ;:)