Question

I worked on a website for which I had a “development URL” that looked something like this:

http://www.example.com.php5-9.dfw1-2.example.com/

Now, several weeks after the website launch, there is at least one page of content indexed on Google with that URL.

Question: How do I redirect all requests from that test URL to reroute to the actual domain?

So, for instance, I would want:

http://www.example.com.php5-9.dfw1-2.example.com/page-name

To go to:

http://www.example.com/page-name

The website is powered by WordPress and hosted on a PHP server. I’ve experimented with .htaccess without much success.

Answer 1

If http://www.example.com is ought to be the only valid host name on your server, you can use this rule to force this host name:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.example\.com|)$
RewriteCond %{HTTPS}s ^on(s)|
RewriteRule ^ http%1://www.example.com%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Otherwise try this rule to redirect just this specific host name:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} =www.example.com.php5-9.dfw1-2.example.com
RewriteCond %{HTTPS}s ^on(s)|
RewriteRule ^ http%1://www.example.com%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

You might additionally check the request method in REQUEST_METHOD since this rule will match any method (GET as well as POST).