301 Redirect "wildcard" question
-
I have been looking at the SEOmoz redirect guide for some advice but I can't seem to find the answer : http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
I have lots of URLs from a previous version of a site that look like the following:
etc etc.
I want to write a redirect so whenever a URL with the terms "-c-25.html" is requested it redirects to a specified page, regardless of what comes after the question mark.
These URLs were created by our previous ecommerce software. The 'c' is for category, and each page of the cateogry created a different URL. I want to do these so I can rediect all of these URLs to the appropraite new cateogry page in a single redirect.
Thanks for any help.
-
When I did a similar transition with hundreds of thousands of links. I created a database table with source and destination columns. Then a script that handles all 404 requests. If the requested link matches an entry in the source column, the user is sent a 301 to the matching destination entry. That allowed for easier maintenance than a huge htaccess file and the server load caused by te script should go down over time as 301 are saved and you contact site owners to update links. The other benefit is that you can do enhanced tracking to see what is request, found and not found and where those people came from.
-
An easy way is to use RedirectMatch, example:
RedirectMatch 301 /-c-25.html http://www.domain.com/new-category
Drop the above in a .htaccess file, test it works how you expect first
-
OK, If I make it the first redirect then the redirection works - regardless of what is written after the 'c-21.html'.
However the redirect is retaining the erroneous URL data after redirection. It is adding the '?blahblahblah" to the end of the new URL. I want it to dispose of this so all the redirects are routed to just one URL. How do I instruct it to not include this unwanted data in the new URL?
Thanks
-
Order matters in Rewrites. You will have to place that Rewrite Rule above the others.
-
I thought that may do it but still nothing. Maybe I am entering it wrong? Here is the code in .htaccess:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /test/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L
]RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /test/index.php [L]
RewriteRule ^-c-21.html(.*)$ http://www.mysitename.com/test/category/t-shirts/dolphin_tshirts [R=301,L
]
The redirect just doesn't happen.
EDIT: If I write a standard redirect : Redirect 301 /test/-c-21.html then it will redirect to the desired page but it will retain the ?blahblah and add it to the new URL. I want it to work like this but discard the ?blahblahblah after redirecting.
-
If you need these to be 301 redirects...
RewriteRule ^-c-25.html(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/dolphin_tshirts [R=301,L]
-
Just to calrify I need a URL that has
/-c-25.html?blahblahblah
to change to:
/dolphin_tshirts
Regardless of that is written in the blahblahblah part.
-
I think that would probably work for him, assuming that the category IDs remain the same.
-
Would something liek this work:
RewriteRule ^-c-(.).html(.)$ category/$1.html$2 [R,NC]
I've not tested it, nor do I claim to be an expert, but I think it will work for what you're tryign to acheive - e.g. -c-25.html becomes category/25.html
-
If your site is in PHP, you could simply add the code...
$targetURL = "http://www.sitename.com/whatever-page-you-what";
if(stristr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],"-c-25.html")) {
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header("Location: $targetURL");
}
?>
If you don't have access to PHP, you could add a line like this to your HTACCESS file...
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} (c-25.html) [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://www.sitename.com/your-target-page [L,R=301]Someone might want to double check me on that rewriteRule above, though.
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
-
I have lose my ranking Via 301 Redirection - How To Recover?
Hey, Folks! I Have Used 301 Redirection Method to Increase My Rankings but When i applied this Method My Website Ranked Down To 55 Numbers. Can anyone Suggest me How to Recover it?
Technical SEO | | SumitJiGupta0 -
Missing 301 redirects
I just had a developer friend call me in a panic, because they had gone live with a new site and found out (the hard way) that they had missed some pages on their 301 redirects. So the pages are appearing in Google but serving 404s. Ouch! So their question was: other than running a report for 404 errors in something like Screaming Frog, is there a way to hunt down ONLY pages serving 404s, then export to CSV so they can be redirected? Anyone got any tricks up their sleeve?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Sudden drop in Rankings after 301 redirect
Greetings to Moz Community. Couple of months back, I have redirected my old blog to a new URL with 301 redirect because of spammy links pointed to my old blog. I have transfer all the posts manually, changed the permalink structure and 301 redirected every individual URL. All the ranking were boosted within couple of weeks and regained the traffic. After a month I have observed, the links pointed to old site are showing up in Webmaster Tools for the new domain. I was shocked (no previous experience) and again Disavowed all links. Today, all the positions went down for new domain. My questions are: 1. Did the Disavow tool worked this time with new domain? All the links pointed to old domain were devaluated? Is this the reason for ranking drop? Or 2. 301 Old domain with Unnatural links causes the issue? 3. Removing 301 will help to regain few keyword positions? I'm taking this as a case study. Already removed the 301 redirect. Looking for solid discussion.Thanks.
Technical SEO | | praveen4390 -
301 Redirect domain with penalty
Wondering if I could get a few views on this please... I have added an affiliate store to a domain I own, however I forgot to noindex the product pages which were duplicate content of the merchants. Despite a good deal of backlink building the site will not do much in the engines at all, doesn't even come up on the first few pages for it's own name! This suggests to me that I have a duplicate content penalty. Try as I may I cannot get it removed so am thinking of cloning the domain to a new domain, however, I do not want to lose the links I collected so I am planning on 301ing them. While I will not get all the link power moved over, I should at least get credit for some of them which will kick start the new domain. Can anyone forsee any potential issues with doing this? Is there a danger of 301ing a site with a penalty that the penalty would be carried over? I know there is no penalty on the links, no WMT warnings etc, it is the content causing the issue. Thanks, Carl
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
What to do with "show all" page
Hello, What should I do with the following situation: In e-commerce shop I have an option to "show all products" (list all products in one page) - do I need to put canonnical or 301 redirect to somewhere or should I leave as normal page - I think google consider this is as duplicate since everything is the same (only number of products is different) ? Regards, Nenad
Technical SEO | | Uniline0 -
A script to automatically write 301 redirect rules to htaccess?
I was wondering if anyone could help provide some resources on how to automatically write 301 redirect rules to htaccess. Allow me to explain... I'm building a new website and the primary users are businesses. They have their own profile pages on the site. The URL is based off of their Company Name. In the event that they decided to change their name... reasons being, perhaps they mispelled it the first time, or they're removing LLC or adding Inc, I want to also change the URL and redirect the old URL to the new URL. Since the URL is based off of their Company Name, making a change to the company name would make a change to the URL. I know it doesn't have to work this way, but for our purpose this works best. In case the old URL had any links to it, I wanted to see if there was an way to automatically update an htaccess file with a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. Could anyone point me in the right direction of how to do this? Perhaps a sample script. I've done a lot of searches on Google and can't seem to find anything. e.g. Original:
Technical SEO | | bimmer540
Name: XYZ Widgets
URL: website.com/xyz-widgets New - business changes their company name in their profile:
Name: XYZ Widgets, Inc.
URL: website.com/xyz-widgets-inc Upon the user saving the changes in their profile, I'd like to write a 301 redirect to an htaccess file:
Redirect 301 /xyz-widgets http://www.website.com/xyz-widgets-inc I know how to manually write redirects and I've got a pretty smart web developer. We've just never triggered a script to automatically write to an htaccess file before. Is this possible? Any resources are appreciated. Any security risks? Thanks!0 -
301 redirect or 302
A client of mine has an international company named www.taxglobalizers.com if you come from Holland they 302 redirect you to the www.taxglobalizers.com/en version of the site and if you come from Holland they redirect with a 302 to www.taxglobalizers.com/nl version. I think it is best to change this in a 301 redirect. Am i correct in this? Kind Regards, Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
Why is a 301 redirected url still getting indexed?
We recently fixed a redirect issue in a website, and although it appears that the redirection is working fine, the url in question keeps on getting crawled, indexed and cached by google. The redirect was done a month ago, and google shows cached version of it, even for a couple of days ago. Manual checking shows that its being redirected, and also a couple of online tools i checked report a 301 redirect. Do you have any idea why this could be happening? The website I'm talking about is www.hotelmajestic.gr and its being redirected to www.hotel-majestic.gr
Technical SEO | | dim_d0