need help matching cells which contain some of the same information

I'm doing a 301 redirect map for an art supply shop so I need to match URLs from the old site to the new one. The trouble is there are over 27,000 URLs and the URLs on the old site are quite different to the ones on the new site. The old URLs need to be matched to their equivalent on the new site, however some pages aren't on the new site in which case the old URL needs to be redirected to an equivalent product or category page.

The old URLs contain keywords, such as category names or product names, but is inconsistent in where they appear. I think I need some sort of smart vlookup type formula.

Thanks in advance!

andycr's picture

Use the Force Luke...

In your position I would be looking at using VBA Macros for this. Even if you can do it with VLOOKUPs, depending on how many category and product names you are looking at, the resulting Formula would be so complex as to be practically impossible to debug and extend to all cases.
With VBA you can break down the old URL into its constituent parts and then search for the new URL in a structured, debugable, way.