.htaccess redirects with dynamic URLs

Question

I am having problems doing a redirect for some URLS, the ones from the old site that have a ? sign, won't redirect, every other URL will do. example: OLD: /laser-alignment-resources/presentations.cfm?pres=diaphragm

NEW: http://www.acquip.com/en/presentations/47-presentation-internal-laser-diaphragm-alignment

Won't work, I am sure I did something wrong but I am a n00b when it comes to .htaccess

all the URLs are in the same format, 14 in total:

OLD:/laser-alignment-resources/presentations.cfm?pres=gas New:http://www.acquip.com/en/presentations/48-presentation-gas-turbine-thermal-alignment

OLD: /laser-alignment-resources/presentations.cfm?pres=train NEW:http://www.acquip.com/en/presentations/49-presentation-complete-machine-train-alignment

any help will be appreciated.

Answer 1

Your question isn't clear on how you're trying to perform the redirects in your .htaccess file, so for next time I'd recommend that you post some samples of the code that you've tried so that we can help you more easily.

Based on your Apache tag and the problem you're describing, I'm going to assume that you were using mod_alias though, trying to do something like this:

Redirect 301 /laser-alignment-resources/presentations.cfm?pres=diaphragm http://www.acquip.com/en/presentations/47-presentation-internal-laser-diaphragm-alignment

This doesn't work though, as the Redirect directive seems to only examine the path portion of the request, and not the query string.

If you have mod_rewrite available, you can setup rewrite rules for the URLs that you need to redirect based on their query strings. This would look something like this:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} =pres=diaphragm
RewriteRule ^laser-alignment-resources/presentations\.cfm$ http://www.acquip.com/en/presentations/47-presentation-internal-laser-diaphragm-alignment [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} =pres=gas
RewriteRule ^laser-alignment-resources/presentations\.cfm$ http://www.acquip.com/en/presentations/48-presentation-gas-turbine-thermal-alignment [R=301,L]

...and so on. You can keep your currently working Redirect statements, as they should work fine side-by-side with these rules.