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
-
301 Redirects from Subdomain to Location Pages
I have a client site that is getting redesigned. Its a multi location service provider. Currently (for whatever reason) the location pages are sub domains. https://<location-name>.site.com/ In the new design the locations will be on the main domain. https://site.com/locations/<location-name> We are considering using 301 redirects from the current sub domains to the new location pages on the main domain. The current sub domains are setup on a multi-site with A records for each one in our GoDaddy account. Would like to get feedback on any unforeseen SEO issues that anyone might have input on.
Technical SEO | | ColeBField12210 -
Redundant categorization - "boys" and "girls" category. Any other suggestions than implementing filtering?
One of our clients (a children's clothing company) has split their categories (outwear, tops, shoes) between boys and girls - There's one category page for girls outwear, and one category for boys outwear. I am suspecting that this redundant categorisation is diluting link juice and rankings for the related search queries. Important points: The clothes themselves are rather gender-neutral, girl's sweaters don't differ that much from the boy's sweaters. Our keyword research indicates that norwegians' search queries are also pretty gender neutral - people are generally searching after "children's dresses", "shoes for kids", "snowsuits", etc. So these gender specific categories are not really reflective of people's search behavior. I acknowledge that implementing a filter for "boys" and "girls" would be the best way to solve this redundant categorization, but that would simply be to expensive for our client. I'm thinking that some sort of canonicalisation would be the best approach to solve this issue. Are there any other suggestions or comments to this?
Technical SEO | | Inevo0 -
.htaccess redirect question
Hi guys and girls Please forgive me for being an apache noob, but I've been trawling for a while now and i can't seem to find a definitive guide for my current scenario. I've walked into a but of a cluster$%*! of a job, to rescue a horribly set up site. One of many, many problems is that they have 132 302redirects set up. Some of these are identical pages but http-https, others are the same but https-http and some are redirects to different content pages with http-http. A uniform redirecting of http to https is not an option so I'm looking to find out the best practice for reconfiguring these 302s to 301s within .htaccess? Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | craig.gto0 -
Help with 301 redirect code
Hi, I can't work out how to make this one work and would apreciate if someone could help.
Technical SEO | | Paul_MC
i have a series of folders from a old site that are in the structure:
/c/123456/bags.html (the "123456" changes and is any series of 6 digit numbers), and the "bags.html" changes depending on the product.
I need that to be 301 redirected to the following format:
/default/bags/bags.html0 -
Changing title tags, do we need 301 redirects
I found many duplicate title tags and I'm in the process of changing it Do I need 301 redirects in place when I switch it? I am only changing the title tag. Also, we are switching over to a new site very soon, I am worried that we might be using too many 301 redirect "hops" because we are doing a lot of optimization as well. (video from matt cutts describing 301 redirects and hops: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA. Does anyone have any experience in doing too many redirect hops that it affected your rankings? Any good ideas to avoid this?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
301 redirect blog posts from old URL to new one
I moved a wordpress blog from domain.com to domain.com/blog . I want to redirect the links in google from the old domain.com to the new one, but I also want to put a new site/application at domain.com..so I'm thinking an .htaccess 301 redirect at the root wouldn't work. Any tips?
Technical SEO | | callmeed0 -
301 Redirect How Long until the juice passes through to new site
Hi Guys, Following on from a question i asked last week in regard to a 301 http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-have-no-ranking I was thinking that i had some kind of issue on the site, although i have gone over it with a fine tooth comb i cannot find any issue's and from the amount of reads the thread has had im sure if there was something obvious it would have been pointed out. So i am quite confident the 301 from site A to site B is fine and working as intended, so my question is how long should it take until the juice is passed From site A to Site B as its 9 weeks now and still down 85% on traffic and even text for my home page if copied into the search bar don't bring up my site Bing is fine and did not see any real traffic drops but Google is not giving me back the rankings i had prior Whenever i have done a 301 before the rankings pretty steady and i see no real loss in rankings but this time ... painful all changes in WMT made
Technical SEO | | kellymandingo
Canonical tag implemented
all Pages 301 and correct 200 response from the targeted page
Sitemap Updated
Many Links Changed from Old site to new (including DMOZ)
no Robots text Blocking directory's
Google crawling freely and regularly The strange thing is New content is indexed immediately and ranks easily, I added a page for my service in my local area and went straight to position 5 in Google however old existing content wont move, I tracked 150 keywords only 4 are top 75 Don't know what else to do so any advice would be much appreciated PS site is around 17k pages Paul0 -
Too many 301 redirects - good or bad?
Hi, Currently, page A is redirecting to page B. I am in the process of developing new site for the same domain and this time page B will be redirected to page C. This is gonna happen on many pages. Is it correct or should i adopt some other strategy? Will it have adverse effect on the speed of my site? Page A -----> Page B ------> Page C Regards, Shailendra
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0