htaccess redirects that ignore query string - .htaccess

I've recently inherited a webserver whose IP previously belonged to a well known band's forums.
Problem is I'm now drowning in 404 errors!
The URLs in question look like this:
http://[server_ip]/forum/ucp.php?mode=register&coppa=0
http://[server_ip]/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=45330
http://[server_ip]/forum/index.php+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Result:+%ED%E5+%...
http://[server_ip]/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=44597&start=0
In an ideal world I would like to redirect any traffic going to /forum/ucp.php, /forum/viewtopic.php or /forum/index.php elsewhere regardless of query string.
Or anything going to /forum/.* elsewhere, if that's doable.
I've tried a number of different solutions with little success, any help appreciated.

Assuming that you want to redirect all traffic to /forum/.* to http://mysite.com/somedirectory, which you can replace with the actual URL you wish to redirect to, you can add the following to the .htaccess in the root directory of your sites domain.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
#for any request starting with forum
RewriteRule ^forum/ http://mysite.com/somedirectory? [NC,L,R=302]
Be sure to keep the ? if you want to remove the query string params from the original query. If you want to make it a permanent redirect, change the 302 to a 301.

Don't really know what you have tried so far but this site will probably help you.
http://perishablepress.com/press/2006/01/10/stupid-htaccess-tricks/#redirects

Related

Redirect issues: New category/article structure / How to get rid of the article id?

I guess, this is an easy one but anyway, I haven't figured it out yet.
After migrating my website from Joomla 3 to Joomla 4 the structure of categories and articles will change. That's why I will need some rules in .htaccess to redirect the old urls to the new ones.
The website is hosted on an Apache server.
The old URL structure looks something like that.
https://www.mydomain.de/category/subcategory/item/[articleID]-[articleAlias].html
[articleID] is a digit.
[articleAlias], e.g. „this-is-article-number-233“
This should be redirected to...
https://www.mydomain.de/newcategory/newsubcategory/[articleAlias].html
An example:
https://www.mydomain.de/category/subcategory/item/2324-this-is-my-latest-article.html
… should be redirected to...
https://www.mydomain.de/newcategory/newsubcategory/this-is-my-latest-article.html
I've played around with RedirectMatch and Rewrite Rule but haven't been successful to make it work. How do I get rid of the article id?
My latest try failed with...
RedirectMatch ^category/subcategory/item/([0-9]+)-(.*)$ /newcategory/newsubcategory/$1
Is there a simple and elegant solution to this? Thanks in advance!
UPDATE
Maybe it's more complex than I thought it was.
Main problem is that not only my categories changed but also the ids of the articles.
So, to stick with my example...
https://www.mydomain.de/category/subcategory/item/2324-this-is-my-latest-article.html
first turns into something like:
https://www.mydomain.de/newcategory/newsubcategory/1223-this-is-my-latest-article.html
Anyway, Joomla 4 is able to drop the article id automatically (guess with an internal rewrite) for seo-friendly URLs. I activated that feature to make the new URLs look like
https://www.mydomain.de/newcategory/newsubcategory/[articleAlias].html
The [articleAlias] stays the same.
A redirection according to what you actually ask should be possible like that:
RewriteEngine on
RedirectRule ^/?category/subcategory/item/[0-9]+-(.*)\.html$ /newcategory/newsubcategory/$1.html [R,L]
However I doubt that this really is what you want: this completely drops the numeric ID of the resource. Which means that it won't be available for processing when the redirected request comes back requesting the new, stripped URL. How do you want to internally rewrite that request back to the internal resource then, without that ID?
I made some more tests and it this is the final solution to my problem:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/?category/subcategory/item/[0-9]+-(.*)\.html$ /newcategory/newsubcategory/$1.html

How to redirect a "bad" url that has a query string but does not start with a ? symbol?

There's a site that has had a bunch of bad links indexed and I've been asked to deal with it. There's one type of link that is giving me a headache:
http://www.example.com/category-display.html&Category_Code=some_cat_code
I tried redirecting to the home page:
Redirect 301 /category-display.html& /
That doesn't work because it adds everything past the & to the url.
In the best of worlds, I'd like to redirect to:
/app/mm.mvc?Category_Code=some_cate_code
So I tried using querystring and RewriteRule/RewriteCond but there's no query string without the ? that I can figure out, so I'm kind of stuck here.
Any ideas?
You can use this rule as your top rule in site root .htaccess:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^category-display\.html&(.*)$ /app/mm.mvc?$1 [L,NC,NE,R=301]

redirect old wordpress ?page_id= to non-wordpress site

I used to have a WP site that I converted to a standard html site. Problem is I found doing a google search that instead of http://www.genealogyinc.com it was returning http://www.genealogyinc.com/?page_id=21, I dont know how many pages are like this but am trying to find a htaccess workaround, all the ones I found online give me 500 server errors.
Need a rewrite for any ?page_id= cause I dont know how many other numbers are out there.
Thanks
Off the top of my head, without testing, it would be something like this.
The first line looks for the page_id querystring parameter, and if it meets it, it should pass on to the second line. The rewrite rule I have below may need some tweaking, but I hope this helps you.
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} page_id=(.*)$
RewriteRule $ /? [R=301,L]

How to redirect a folder and its pages to a single page

I'm trying to redirect some files and I'm pretty stuck. There are way too many to do some of them on a "page-per-page" basis and so I need a quick way as these pages are insignificant but return 404's at the moment.
I have a page like this "/old-blog/tag/page", I previously redirected the "old-blog" to "new-blog" so I get "/new-blog/tag/page" but now I want "tag" and all pages after this to be sent to "new-blog". I hope this example makes sense, please ask if I've missed something.
I'm doing my redirects with my .htaccess file so I'd like a method I can use with this in mind.
Thanks, Dan.
You may already have rewrite rules, if there are rules that do some type of routing, then mod_rewrite and mod_alias is going to conflict (RedirectMatch is mod_alias). So try sticking with just mod_rewrite. Try adding these rules, above any other rules, in the htaccess file in your document root:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/?old-blog/tag /new-blog/ [L,R=301]

using mod_rewrite to create SEO friendly URLS

I've been searching google for this but can't find the solution to my exact needs. Basically I've already got my URL's named how I like them i.e. "http://mysite.com/blog/page1.php"
What I'm trying to achieve (if it's possible!) is to use rewrite to alter the existing URLS to: "http://mysite.com/blog/page1"
The problem I've come across is I've found examples that will do this if the user enters "http://mysite.com/blog/page1" into the broweser which is great, however I need it to work for the existing links in google as not to loose traffic, so incoming URLS "http://mysite.com/blog/page1.php" are directed to "http://mysite.com/blog/page1".
The 1st example (Canonical URLs) at the following is pretty much what you want:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html#url
This should do the trick, rewriting requests without .php to have it, invisible to the user.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/blog/([^.]+)$ /blog/$1.php
You will need to write a rewrite rule for mapping your old url's to your new url as a permanent redirect. This will let the search engine know that the new, seo friendly url's are the ones to be used.
RewriteRule blog/page1.php blog/page1 [R=301,L]

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