Question

There are external links pointing to my site (that I have no control over) which contain bad query strings. Here is an example:

http://www.example.com/page/&query=string

The above results in a 404 page on my site. Because “http://www.example.com/page/” exists on my site, I want to use a .htaccess file to remove any bad query strings so the user can get to the correct content.

So I want this rewrite or redirect:

http://www.example.com/page/&query=string  -> http://www.example.com/page/

Any and all help is appreciated!

Answer 1

The following should do as you said issuing a 301 redirect to the requesting browser.

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} query=string
RewriteRule ^/page/ /page/ [R=301]

However you just want to serve the right content you can avoid the 301 redirect with this:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} query=string
RewriteRule ^/page/ /page/ [PT,NS,E=QUERY_STRING:]

It will remove the QUERY_STRING entirely so be aware.

If you wanted to rewrite some different query strings but not all for /page/

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} query=badstring1 [OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} query=badstring2 [OR]
RewriteRule ^/page/ /page/ [PT,NS]

All RewriteRules assume that you have the “RewriteEngine On” somewhere, it is possible likely that your host has this done. It will also require the mod_rewrite module in Apache which I assume is in use based on the .htaccess request.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_rewrite.html

That all said this seems very unnecessary as a page will ignore the arguments if it does not need them, unless of course this is being passed to a script in which case you should be able to handle this in the code, but perhaps you have a framework that is causing issues.

This is a great book on the subject:
Pro Apache
See pages 277-299