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.
301 doesn't redirect a page that ends in %20, and others being appended with ?q=
-
I have a product page that ends /product-name**%20** that I'm trying to redirect in this way:
Redirect 301 /products/product-name%20 http://www.site.com/products/product-name
And it doesn't redirect at all. The others, those with %20, are being redirected to a url hybrid of old and new: http://www.site.com/products/product-name**?q=old-url**
I'm using Drupal CMS, and it may be creating rules that counter my entries.
-
I know this is an old thread, but I actually spotted this issue while trying to fix it myself. I was able to fix it by using quotes and a literal space. So for example, instead of
RewriteRule ^/products/product%20name$ http://www.site.com/products/new-url [R=301,L]
use
RewriteRule "^/products/product name$" http://www.site.com/products/new-url [R=301,L]
Hope that helps.
-
I've managed to 301 everything except that pesky %20 url, perhaps because of the %20 or perhaps because that's also the only one in a folder.
Here's what's worked for simple urls such as www.site.com/old-page
RewriteRule ^old-page$ http://www.site.com/new-page [R=301,L]
But the same format for the %20 hasn't worked:
RewriteRule ^/products/product-name%20$ http://www.site.com/products/new-url [R=301,L]
-
I think this is the culprit:
Rewrite URLs of the form 'x' to the form 'index.php?q=x'.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/favicon.ico
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]At the moment,
Redirect 301 /old-page http://www.site.com/new-pagecreates
www.site.com/new-page?q=old-pageI have tried the 301s both before the CMS rule and after it, without success.
-
Hmmm... I was going to also suggest trying replacing the %20 with an actual space -
Redirect 301 "/products/product-name " http://www.site.com/products/product-name
Now that you say none of the redirects are working as expected, did you try adding the 301 redirects above the Drupal rules in your .htaccess file? Can you paste the contents of your .htaccess?
-
Thanks for the reply. I tried it but it didn't work, but I given incorrect info in the question, which is now corrected. I had said other 301 were working fine when in fact they weren't. Those without %20 are redirecting to an odd hybrid of urls.
After some searching, I think this has something to do with the drupal CMS and the rules it creates in htaccess.
-
Try putting it in quotes -
Redirect 301 "/products/product-name%20" http://www.site.com/products/product-name
Let me know if that doesn't work...
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
-
Would You Redirect a Page if the Parent Page was Redirected?
Hi everyone! Let's use this as an example URL: https://www.example.com/marvel/avengers/hulk/ We have done a 301 redirect for the "Avengers" page to another page on the site. Sibling pages of the "Hulk" page live off "marvel" now (ex: /marvel/thor/ and /marvel/iron-man/). Is there any benefit in doing a 301 for the "Hulk" page to live at /marvel/hulk/ like it's sibling pages? Is there any harm long-term in leaving the "Hulk" page under a permanently redirected page? Thank you! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amag0 -
Htaccess - Redirecting TAG or Category pages
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jes-Extender-Australia0 -
301 redirect hops from non-https and www
It's best practice to minimize the amount of 301 redirect hops. Ideally only one redirect hop. It's also best practice to 301 redirect (or at least canonical) your non-https and/or your non-www (or www) to the canonical protocol/subdomain. The simplest (and possibly the most common) way to implement canonical protocol/subdomain redirects is through a load balancer or before your app processes the request. Both of which will just blanket 301 to the canonical domain/protocol regardless if the path exists or not In which case, you could have: Two hops. i.e. hop #1 http://example.com/foo to https://example.com/foo, hop #2 https://example.com/foo to https://example.com/bar 301 to a 404. Let's say https://example.com/dog never existed, but somebody for whatever reason linked to it (maybe a typo). If I request https://www.example.com/dog, the load balancer would 301 to a 404 page. Either scenario above should be fairly rare. However, you can't control how people link to you. Should I care about either above scenario? I could have my app attempt to check if the page exists before forwarding, but that code could be complicated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsbud0 -
Several 301 Redirects to Same Page
Hi, I have 3 Pages we won't use anymore in our website. Let's call them url A, url B and url C. To keep their SEO strength on our domain, I've though about redirecting all of them to url D. For what I understand, when 301 redirecting, about 85-90% of the link SEO juice is passed. Then, if I redirect 3 URLs to the same page... does url D receive all the link SEO juices for URLs added up? (approximately)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
e.g. future url D juice = 100% current url D juice + 85% url A juice + 85% url B juice + 85% url C juice Is this the best practice, or is there a better way? Cheers,0 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
What are the effects of having Multiple Redirects for pages under the same domain
Dear Mozers, First of all let me wish you all a Very Happy, Prosperous, Healthy, Joyous & Successful New Year ! I'm trying to analyze one of the website's Web Hosting UK Com Ltd. and during this process I've had this question running through my mind. This project has been live since the year 2003 and since then there have be changes made to the website (obviously). There have also been new pages been added, the same way some new pages have even been over-written with changes in the url structures too. Now, coming back to the question, if I've have a particular url structure in the past when the site was debuted and until date the structure has been changes thrice (for example) with a 301 redirect to every back dated structure, WOULD it impact the sites performance SEOwise ? And let's say that there's hundreds of such redirections under the same domain, don't you think that after a period of time we should remove the past pages/urls from the server ? That'd certainly increase the 404 (page not found) errors, but that can be taken care of. How sensible would it be to keep redirecting the bots from one url to the other when they only visit a site for a short stipulated time? To make it simple let me explain it with a real life scenario. Say if I was staying a place A then switched to a different location in another county say B and then to C and so on, and finally got settled at a place G. When I move from one place to another, I place a note of the next destination I'm moving to so that any courier/mail etc. can be delivered to my current whereabouts. In such a case there's a less chance that the courier would travel all the destinations to deliver the package. Similarly, when a bot visits a domain and it finds multiple redirects, don't you think that it'd loose the efficiency in crawling the site? Ofcourse, imo. the redirects are important, BUT it should be there (in htaccess) for only a period of say 3-6 months. Once the search engine bots know about the latest pages, the past pages/redirects should be removed. What are your opinions about this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eukmark0 -
Is it ok to use both 301 redirect and rel="canonical' at the same time?
Hi everyone, I'm sorry if this has been asked before. I just wasn't able to find a response in previous questions. To fix the problems in our website regarding duplication I have the possibility to set up 301's and, at the same time, modify our CMS so that it automatically sets a rel="canonical" tag for every page that is generated. Would it be a problem to have both methods set up? Is it a problem to have a on a page that is redirecting to another one? Is it advisable to have a rel="canonical" tag on every single page? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SDLOnlineChannel0 -
Any way to find which domains are 301 redirected to competitors' websites?
By looking at the work from an SEO collegue it became clear that his weak linkbuilding graph probably is not the cause for his good rankings for a pretty competitive keyword. (also no social mentions where found) I was wondering what it could be, site structure and other on page optimization factors seems to be ok and I don't think there will be exceptionally good or bad user behavior... Finally I looked at the competitors and found that they have more links, better content en better design, so I got a little stuck. The only reason I can think of is that he is doing 301 redirects (or is rel=canonical tags). Is there a way to trace these redirects back to the source in order to include this important variable in your competitor research? thnx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djingel10