Question

I am currently getting 404 errors on Google crawler.

Situation:

There are user profiles under this domain structure:

http://www.domain.com/user/username

but: http://www.domain.com/user is not a real page so it throws a 404 error.

http://www.domain.com/users exists.

So, is there a way to redirect people who type in http://www.domain.com/user to http://www.domain.com/users without affecting http://www.domain.com/user/username ?

Thanks

Answer 1

Yes, a RewriteRule with an expression that anchors the end of the URL at user with $ can be rewritten accordingly. The /? allows for an optional trailing /.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^user/?$ users [L,R=301]

The above will redirect the browser so the URL /users shows in the address bar. If you only want a silent internal rewrite, change [L,R=301] to [L].

If you don’t want to invoke mod_rewrite, you can probably use a RedirectMatch instead.

RedirectMatch ^/user/?$ http://example.com/users