RedirectMatch in .htaccess not working

Question

I am using Transposh plugin to make my site 'bilingual'. Unfortunately, despite having English as the default language and therefore available at carolineelisa.com/xxx, Google is indexing carolineelisa.com/en/xxx. See:

http://www.google.com/search?q=caroline+elisa

Until the plugin gets a fix, I am trying to use RedirectMatch to tell Google to index the root folder, not /en/ subdirectory.

This is what I have in my .htaccess file in the site root directory, as well as in the .htaccess file in the /wordpress/ subdirectory where the wordpress installation is (as I am not sure where to put it!).

RedirectMatch 302 ^/en/$ /

Is this the correct method and syntax? It does not seem to be working.

FYI the complete .htaccess file in the root directory is:

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

RedirectMatch 302 ^/en/$ /

# END WordPress

Answer 1

1) Why would you use RedirectMatch directive (from mod_alias) when you already have more powerful RewriteRule directives (mod_rewrite) in place? Why mix them up?

2) In any case -- your RedirectMatch rule will never be executed, since WordPress rules, the way how they done, will intercept all requests (unless, of course, if you really have /en/ folder).

You need:

• convert rule to use RewriteRule instead of RedirectMatch (so it plays nicely with WordPress rules)
• insert such rule somewhere before/on the top of WordPress rules

Something like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteBase /

  # your rule before WordPress rules
  RewriteRule ^en/(.*)$ /$1 [R=302,L]

  RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

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I am using Transposh plugin to make my site 'bilingual'. Unfortunately, despite having English as the default language and therefore available at carolineelisa.com/xxx, Google is indexing carolineelisa.com/en/xxx.

BTW -- in such case using canonical URLs is very recommended option (one of the reasons why it was created): http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

For example:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://carolineelisa.com/testimonials/" />

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Another thing -- it's better to use 301 (Permanent Redirect) response code instead of 302 (Found) for such redirects (although 302 is better for testing as it is not cached by browsers + it allows easier "recovery" in case something goes wrong (e.g. redirecting to a wrong place etc etc)).