Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Htaccess - Redirecting TAG or Category pages

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Htaccess - Redirecting TAG or Category pages

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    4
    931
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Jes-Extender-Australia
      Jes-Extender-Australia last edited by

      Hello Fellow Moz's,

      We have an issue redirecting some /TAG and /Category pages to inner pages.

      As an example we use:

      RedirectMatch 301 /category/Sample-Category(.*) https://OurDomain.com.au/New-Page//$1

      That works well.

      The issue is we have other categories and tags that are named similar to /Sample-Category

      As an example, if we try to redirect /Sample-Category-1 to /New-Page-1 - it will not work, and redirects to /New-Page

      I assume this is because /Sample-Category is already being redirected, so anything after /Sample-Category like -1 or -2 or -3 etc, will not be recognized.

      Anyone know of a workaround?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • ThompsonPaul
        ThompsonPaul last edited by

        The regex in your RedirectMatch doesn't say what you think it says, Jes 🙂

        This part (note the bolded part of the expression (.*)😞

        /category/Sample-Category**(.*)**

        doesn't actually say "match the URL that is specifically** /category/Sample-Category"**

        That**.*** is a wildcard thatmeans "and any other additional characters that might occur here"

        So what it's saying is "match the URL /category/Sample-Category _**as well as **_any URLs that have any additional characters after the letter "y" in category. Which is what is catching your -1 variation of the URL (or the -size-30 in your second example).

        In addition, that wildcard has been set as a variable (the fact it's in brackets), which you are then attempting to insert into the end of the new URL (with the $1), which I don't think is your intent.

        Instead, try:

        RedirectMatch 301 /category/Sample-Category https://OurDomain.com.au/New-Page/

        you should get the redirect you're looking for, and not have it interfere with the other ones you wish to write.

        Let me know if that solves the issue? Or if I've misunderstood why you were trying to include the wildcard variable?

        Paul

        P.S. You'll need to be very specific whether the origin or target URLs use trailing slashes - I just replicated the examples you provided.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • Jes-Extender-Australia
          Jes-Extender-Australia @seoman10 last edited by

          It's not as easy as that unfortunately.

          I will reiterate.....If we redirect.....

          RedirectMatch 301 /category/Blue-Shirts https://OurDomain.com.au**/Blue-Shirts**//$1 - it works, BUT....if we redirect another similar category page to different inner page like....

          RedirectMatch 301 /category/Blue-Shirts-Size-30 https://OurDomain.com.au****/Blue-Shirts-Size-30****//$1 - it redirects to the first inner page example above.

          That's why I was assuming it's not working because in the second example the sever sees /Blue-Shirts and ignores everything after it i.e the "Size-30".

          Hopefully that makes it clearer?

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • seoman10
            seoman10 last edited by

            If I've understood you correctly, all you need to do is to add a tag with the relevant content same as the old one.

            Jes-Extender-Australia 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • ParisChildress

              If a page ranks in the wrong country and is redirected, does that problem pass to the new page?

              Hi guys, I'm having a weird problem: A new multilingual site was launched about 2 months ago. It has correct hreflang tags and Geo targetting in GSC for every language version. We redirected some relevant pages (with good PA) from another website of our client's. It turned out that the pages were not ranking in the correct country markets (for example, the en-gb page ranking in the USA). The pages from our site seem to have the same problem. Do you think they inherited it due to the redirects? Is it possible that Google will sort things out over some time, given the fact that the new pages have correct hreflangs? Is there stuff we could do to help ranking in the correct country markets?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParisChildress
              1
            • LesleyPaone

              Schema markup concerning category pages on an ecommerce site

              We are adding json+ld data to an ecommerce site and myself and one of the other people working on the site are having a minor disagreement on things. What it comes down to is how to mark up the category page. One of us says it needs to be marked up with as an Itempage, https://schema.org/ItemPage  The other says it needs to be marked up as products, with multiple product instances in the schema, https://schema.org/Product The main sticking point on the Itemlist is that Itemlist is a child of intangible, so there is a feeling that should be used for things like track listings or other arbitrary data.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LesleyPaone
              2
            • Striventa

              Too many Tags and Categories what should I do to clean this up?

              Hello, Everyone! I am trying to do a clean up for one of my client sites. I'm noticing that the Categories and tags are way out of hand. It looks like random tags and categories were just added because they could be added. Are all of these tags and categories contributing to duplicate content? And if so What method should I go about to cleaning this up? The only thing that seems logical to me is rel=canonical. Thank you so much!

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Striventa
              1
            • PeteC12

              H2 Tags- Can you have more than 1 H2 tag

              Hi All, Screaming frog has identified that we have a few H2 tags on our pages , although we only have 1 H1 tag. We have numerous H3,H4's etc. I am wondering, is it good SEO to have only 1 H2 tag like with H1 tag or can you have more ? thanks Peter

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC12
              0
            • soralsokal

              Ranking Page - Category vs. Blog Post - What is best for CTR?

              Hi, I am not sure wether I shall rank with a category page, or create a new post. Let me explain... If I google for 'Basic SEO' I see an article from Rand with Authorship markup. That's cool so I can go straight to this result because I know there might be some good insight. BUT: 'Basic SEO' is also an category at MOZ an it is not ranking. On the other hand, if I google for 'advanced SEO' then the MOZ category for 'advanced SEO' is ranking. But there is no authorship image, so users are much less likely to click on that result. Now, I want to rank for a very important keyword for me (content keyword, not transactional). Therefor, I have a category called 'yoga exercises'. But shall I rather create an post about them only to increase CTR due to Google Authorship? I read in Google guidelines that Authorship on homepage an category pages are not appreciated. Hope you have some insights that can help me out.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal
              0
            • Mark_Ch

              Will redirecting poor traffic web pages increase web presence

              A number of pages on my site have low traffic metrics. I intend to redirect poor performing pages to the most appropriate page with high traffic. Example
              www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greyshoes
              www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greenshoes
              www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-redshoes all of the above will be redirected to the following page:
              www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes Question
              Will carrying out htaccess redirects from the above example influence to web positioning of both www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes and www.sampledomomain.co.uk Regards Mark

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
              0
            • mjk26

              tags inside <a>tags - is this bad?</a>

              Hi, I'm currently redesigning my website, and in many places, I've now decided to make links a little bit more obvious for the user, using tags within a <a>tag in order to make the entire block of text clickable.  I was just wondering if this could have a negative impact in the search engines.  My gut feeling is no, since I'm actually improving usability, but I guess it could have an impact on how Google looks at the anchor text?  An example of the HTML is as follows: </a> <a></a> <a></a> [Cristal Night Club Hotels <address>1045 5th Street
              Miami Beach, FL33139</address> 6.4 miles from Miami Dade County Auditorium](http://localhost:8080/frontend/venue-hotels/cristal-night-club-hotels/301022 "Hotels near Cristal Night Club") Thanks for your thoughts and comments, Best wishes Mike

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjk26
              0
            • mhans

              Any penalty for having rel=canonical tags on every page?

              For some reason every webpage of our website (www.nathosp.com)  has a rel=canonical tag. I'm not sure why the previous SEO manager did this, but we don't have any duplicate content that would require a canonical tag. Should I remove these tags? And if so, what's the advantage - or disadvantage of leaving them in place? Thank you in advance for your help. -Josh Fulfer

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhans
              1

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.