Either I am too tired to see what I am doing wrong or there is something important I am missing here.
Basically I have a simple set of rewrite rules which are used in conjunction with a central dispatcher file (index.php) to handle requests coming for HTML, CSS and JavaScript files separately and they look like this.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.+)\.html$ index.php?action=view&url=$1.html [L]
RewriteRule (.+)\.css$ index.php?action=resource&type=css&url=$1.css [L]
RewriteRule (.+)\.js$ index.php?action=resource&type=js&url=$1.js [L]
Long story cut short these rules work fine however I’ve been notified by the SEO agency responsible for the site that there is an error in one of the URLs which needs to be permanently redirected (301) to the correct link. Since its just one URL that requires redirecting I have chosen to use Redirect instead of URL rewriting and added the following rule.
Redirect 301 /page1.html /page2.html
This works well too except for the fact that after the remote redirection is done for page1.html I get the query part (?action=view&url=page2.html) displayed in browsers address bar. I perfectly understand that the HTMl rewriting rule simply added the query string part after it was done with the URL but what would I need to do to get rid of the query part after a remote 301 redirection is performed.
Just to add I tried the URL rewrite method too but it seems that whatever I do the L flag is simply ignored and the HTML rewrite rule is still executed.
That’s a rewrite redirect and should cut off the query string. Put it before your other 3 rules, otherwise it will be ignored.