Help needed please with 301 redirects in htaccess file.
-
In summary, we're currently having issues with our htaccess file. 301 redirects are going through to the new described URL but in addition the new URL is followed by a ? and the old URL. How can we get rid of the ? and previous URL so they don't appear as an ending.
None of the examples we've found re this issue online appear to work. Can anyone please offer some advice? Can we use a RewriteRule to stop this happening?
Here's a summary of the htaccess file
REDIRECT CODE BEGINS HERE
LONG LIST OF REDIRECTS, which appear to be set up perfectly fine.
REDIRECT CODE ENDS
DirectoryIndex index.php
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymLinks
DirectoryIndex index.php
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond $1 !^(images|system|themes|pdf|favicon.ico|robots.txt|index.php) [NC]
RewriteRule ^.htaccess$ - [F]
RewriteRule ^favicon.ico - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]</ifmodule>DirectoryIndex index.php
-
Hi Cyrus,
Thank you so very much. Success! I can't tell you how delighted and grateful I am. I have spent hours over the Easter weekend trying to fix it, but to no avail. You are a god in my eyes! You have made my day and halted the rash of broken/duped links emanating from our website.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Very best,
Peter
-
Ha! I always get myself into trouble when trying to answer these .htaccess questions. Someday I'll learn.
I'm not an expert, but here's one thing you can try. Make sure to backup your file before you attempt these, in case you break something you want to be able to quickly back it up. My suspicion is there are conflicting rules in the file that are causing the wrong redirection.
-Try changing your rewrite rules to the following format. The "L" indicates this is the last directive, and place no more rewriting rules on this condition.
RewriteRule ^tours2006.html http://www.petersommer.com/escorted-archaeological-tours/ [L,R=301]
If this doesn't work, let me know and I'll try to find someone who knows more.
-
Many thanks Cyrus. Sorry to hear you're confused! Thank you for offering to help.
There are redirects of a number of old pages. Here's a sample of them.
redirect 301 /index.html http://www.petersommer.com/
redirect 301 /writing_index.html http://www.petersommer.com/travel-writing/
Unfortunately I'm not sure what isn't working or what needs to be done to fix it. I wish I did! I assume it must be something in the Rewrite Rules or we need to add in some Rewrite Rules to fix it.
All the redirects are unfortunately adding a ? and the old URL to the end of the new redirected URL.
All are following the same pattern - unfortunately.
If you can see any glitches in the Rewrite Rules or can identify something we need to add that will be super.
Thanks again, Peter
-
Hi Peter,
Would love to help out, but by this point in the thread I'm thoughtfully confused! Any chance we could start from the beginning? If you would like, please list
- exactly an example URL you are trying to redirect,
- The exact code that isn't working
- The end result of how it redirects.
Not promising I can help any more than Marisa, and maybe my brain just hurts right now, but I'm willing to give it a shot. Thanks.
-
Thanks for trying Marisa. Appreciate your time and effort. Best wishes, Peter
-
I'm not sure if I can help further or not, since I'm certainly not an Apache coding expert. Right off the bat it seems like you may have a dynamic URL redirect already in place, so when you add anther redirect, it's in a sense, putting a double redirect on the URLs.
I wish I could help further, but one thing I will say is that the only way I've found redirects from multiple directories to work is to put the redirects in each corresponding directory's .htaccess file, and not the root. I wish there was an easier way to do it, and if there is, I hope someone will chime in here and enlighten us.
Sorry I couldn't be of further assistance.
-
Thanks so much for the quick response Marisa. Apologies if I've confused in any way.
The 301 redirect of the gallery tombs is just one of a long list of redirects, hence 'other redirects...' I removed the rest just for ease.
The htaccess is in the main root. I just happened to leave a gallery page as an example of a redirect.
I wondered if there might be a Rewriterule that I could include in the file to solve this issue across the board rather than deal individually - there's about 100 redirects including the one mentioned.
If you can assist further that would be brilliant! I'd really appreciate it.
best wishes,
Peter
-
Are you putting the code in the .htaccess of the root directory of of the gallery directory? If you're putting it in the root, that is your first mistake. Try putting the following code in the .htaccess of the gallery directory:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /RedirectMatch 301 (.*)kaunos-tombs-dalyan-photo.html$ http://www.petersommer.com/gallery/
Replace the .html with .php or whatever the extension of the kaunos-tombs-dalyan-photo file is.
One question, though. Is kaunos-tombs-dalyan-photo a directory or a file? meaning is your URL technically this: http://www.petersommer.com/gallery/?/gallery/kaunos-tombs-dalyan-photo.html or this: http://www.petersommer.com/gallery/?/gallery/kaunos-tombs-dalyan-photo/index.html
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Redirecting 301 or 302?
Hi, I think the part of this question has been already discussed, but not exactly the same, I think. My site requires authentication for member page. When a user try to go to member area, we redirect to 3rd party to do the authentication. 1. user clicks a link to www.mysite.com/member/contents.html
Technical SEO | | HypermediaSystems
2. www.myauthenticate.com/login?h=somehashuniquehash454859428778545 (enters id/pass)
3. login success => redirect back to www.mysite.com/member/contents.html We are doing it 302, temporary redirect. But moz crawler error seems to suggest we should do it 301.
So my question is:
A. Should we do it 301???
B. If we do 301, what happens to myauthenticate.com? since it has hashtag, I am afraid it could create a lot of duplicate contents on myauthenticate.com side... Thank you so much for your help in advance...0 -
301 Redirect Help
How would you 301 redirect and entire folder to a specific file within the same domain? Scenario www.domain.com/folder to www.domain.com/file.html Thanks for your Input...
Technical SEO | | dhidalgo11 -
Help with site structure needed - any assistance welcomed!
Hi all, I am currently tasked with finding a better way to optimise our website ukdocumentstorage dot com. For starters, I would like to know what our site structure actually is at present. So I would like to be able to see which pages are linking to what at the moment & which pages have broken links on which I need to remove from the content. Hopefully I'd then be able to tidy up any errors that the site already has in its internal linking. Is there a way to do this easily? Or to have a graphical representation of the sites structure? I have just signed into our Webmaster Tools account and I am faced with a list of 10 'Crawl Errors' which are all 404 errors. Some of them do not actually exist anymore, but are still being linked to from a few pages according to WMT. For example, /industries_served_legal.htm is still being linked to from 5 of our pages (including /industries_served_local_authority.htm) However, this doesn't seem to be a case at all on the page as I can't find a link to /industries_served_legal.htm on /industries_served_local_authority.htm. Any advice as to why this is happening? Is there a way to find out easily where these broken links are situated on the page? And if I do actually manage to find our broken links, how would I go about removing them? The page /document_security.htm doesn't exist in our Sitewizard list of pages anymore, yet still exists online. How do I go about deleting this unecessary page properly? And does this harm our rankings? The document_security page also has an extra link on the top toolbar to a Document Management page, an addition which is no longer present on our up to date pages. Now this page (and the extra dropdown page when you hover over it) still exist on our list of Sitewizard pages at the moment, but we obviously no longer want to have these online anymore. How should I remove these? I understand that this is a lot of information, and so I would appreciate any help that can be given on these! Many thanks
Technical SEO | | janc0 -
How do I fix a 301 Redirect Loop?
Saturday I waas doing some correcting of some duplicate titles, including nofollowing tags, etc. (my main problem was duplicate titles due to tags and categories being indexed). Now this morning I see that one of my pages refuses to load, citing a 301 redirect loop. http://www.incredibleinfant.com/feeding/switching-baby-formula/ Originally, the page was posted under the wrong category. http://www.incredibleinfant.com/uncategorized/switching-baby-formula I resaved it under the correct category (feeding) and now it won't load. Can someone help me figure out how to correct this mess? Thanks so much Heather
Technical SEO | | Gotmoxie0 -
301 redirects and seo..
I bought a domain and it has nice traffic. It only has about 5 main pages in php When i got the site i switched to html because php was overkill. I did the 301 and google deleted the php files and replaced with html version when i check site:domain.com It has been about 7 days. I DID NOT use 301 for each of the 5 pages to go php to html instead is used this code RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | samerk
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com
RewriteRule (.) http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RedirectMatch 301 (.).php$ http://www.mydomain.com$1.html So basically if you load php it will load the html version. dog.php > dog.html Is this OKAY? or should it be done differently.... worried! Thanks !0 -
How many jumps between 301 redirects is acceptable?
For example, I have a page A that should be redirected to page D, but instead A redirects to B, B redirects to C and C redirects to D. It's something I came across and wondering if its worth the dev time to change it. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | pbrothers240 -
Google Confusion: Two Sites and a 301 Redirect.
Hi, We have a client who just sprang a new project on us. As always, they went ahead and did some stuff before bringing us into the loop! (oh the joy of providing SEO services!) Anyway, i'm pretty swamped right now and need some extra brains on this. Basically the client had www.examplesiteA.com online for many years (an affiliate site which had built up a strong brand in the industry). They have now decided to turn this affiliate site into a full blown service platform and so with the new site being built they 301'd the whole thing over to www.examplesiteB.com - this is where they want all the old affiliate content to be hosted. So essentially examplesiteA.com is now examplesiteB.com and a new site is being placed on examplesiteA.com - still with me? So this has all happened and a brand new website is on examplesiteA.com and the old examplesiteA is now sitting exactly as it used to, but on the examplesiteB domain. The 301 redirect has been removed and the new examplesiteA seems to have been crawled, but the homepage is not indexed. When you search for examplesiteA, examplesiteB is the top result. Now they are similar domain names and to be fair I have very little data at this point i.e. I don't know when the 301 redirect was removed and it maybe that this all fixes itself with time. How is link equity effected now that examplesiteA.com was 301 redirected to examplesiteB.com and cached in this way, but now the 301 redirect has been removed and does not exist? Would link juice have been diluted throughout the process? Obviously if we had been in on all this before anything was implemented we would have done things differently. Interested to hear what others would do coming in at this point. Thanks and look forward to the advice!
Technical SEO | | MarcLevy0 -
301 redirect
We have just had an outside SEO agency report on our site: One of things brought up were arounf broken links, and how they class them as broken links. Could any body tell me whether this statement holds true please, as I am not aware of this "Our latest intelligence shows that google are downgrading ranking from sites that feature 301 redirects within the internal link structure". Any help would be greatly appreciated Regards
Technical SEO | | Yozzer0