Apache Mod_Rewrite query string to standard url

Question

Hi there,

I was using a .htaccess redirect 301 to redirect a URL which then appended all the query string elements to the end, leaving me with some URLs indexed in Google as /store/product/?d=department&s=section&p=product.

I have fixed the redirect by using a RewriteRule instead which doesn't append the query strings, however I'm stuck trying to rewrite the old redirected URLs with the query strings back to the original URLs (as these are looking like two different URLs to Google now).

I have managed to get a RewriteRule to sort of work, in that /store/product/xxxxx redirects to /store/product/ as it should, it just doesn't seem to work with the whole query string of.

What I have been using is:

RewriteRule ^store/product/([a-zA-Z0-9\-_\?=&]+)$ http://www.example.com/store/product/ [NC,R=301,L]

or

RewriteRule ^store/product/\?d=department&s=section&p=product$ http://www.example.com/store/product/ [NC,R=301,L]

Hope that all makes sense!

Many thanks

Answer 1

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^$
RewriteRule ^store/product/.*$ http://www.example.com/store/product/? [NC,R=301,L]

Answer 2

You need to specify an empty query in your substitution to not have the original one automatically appended to the new URL:

RewriteRule ^store/product/[a-zA-Z0-9\-_=&]+$ http://www.example.com/store/product/? [NC,R=301,L]

Note the ? at the end of the substitution URL.