Question

I have the following .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteRule (.*)$ ./page.php?name=$1

I also have about 20 different static addressess I want to do a 301 redirect to.

It should look something like:

Redirect 301 http://www.example.com/category.php?id=3 http://www.example.com/books
Redirect 301 http://www.example.com/articles.php?id=124 http://www.example.com/birds

I tried every method and failed.

Can somebody help me?

Answer 1

I’m guessing your after a set of SEO friendly URL’s for those in your redirect examples, if this is the case then you don’t want a browser redirect, instead you want an Internal Redirect or Alias e.g.

RewriteRule ^/?books /category.php?id=3    [L]
RewriteRule ^/?birds /articles.php?id=124  [L]

If you have many rules and have access to the httpd.conf you may want to consider a rewrite map file and rule.

Per your comment BELOW, if you want to force users/crawlers to the new URL structure then you’ll need an additional set of Rewrite rules in the file (not redirects) e.g.

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST}      /category\.php     [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING}     ^id=3  [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*                 http://%{HTTP_HOST}/books?   [R=301,L]

FYI: The Apache mod_rewrite documentation is worth a read if your unclear as to what the above rules do, or if you want something a little more abstract consider the following post.