301 redirection help on wordpress

Question

Hello all friends, I'm searching for a 301 redirect rules in .htaccess for the last one week. I have visited many similar pages here too. But all are not working for me. So I'm asking help from masters like you.

I'm using wordpress blogging platform. Before I was using Joomla and that time so many 404 errors was there on my website. There are more than 10,000s of 404 errors. Mainly two category of 404 errors. Examples are example.com//component/option,com_xmap/Itemid,44/component/xxx/yyy/menu1/menu2/something/ and example.com/index.php/component/option,com_xmap/Itemid,44/component/xxx/yyy/directory/menu1/menu2/something.html. Like these too many urls. I think this happened due to some cache problem in Joomla and these urls were created one by one on the homepage of a module. After I disabled cache for that module the problem was solved, but google indexed all these bad urls already.

I think it's better to do a 301 redirect for those two categories of 404 error urls to the homepage or to www.freezonal.com/sitemap.xml since these urls are only indexed by google and are not seen in search results.

Currently I'm using this on my .htaccess

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} .*
RewriteRule ^index.php/(.*)$ /? [R=301,L]

Is there any 301 redirection code for redirecting those two categories of 404 urls to the main website and is there any other suggestion for better SEO. I'll be very thankful to you, if you solve this.

Answer 1

First, WordPress' rewrite rules must be on the bottom, because they slurp up any 404s. Anything after them isn't going to work correctly. So add new rules above WordPress' rules.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule (index.php/|/)?component/option http://example.com/ [L,R=301]

Something like that should work. I don't know if you want to keep any of your /component/ URLs working, so you may need to remove the question mark from the RewriteRule.