htaccess rewriterule not working for old urls for site rebuild

Question

I am struggling to get the rewrite rules working in .htaccess for search links on a property rental website I am working on.

The old links are like this:

example.com/index.php?proptype=Villa&action=search

and the new search link equivalent will be like this:

example.com/listing?holidaytype=Villa

Before I tried with wildcards I wanted to test with a set parameter. I have tried both of the following approaches but neither works.

RewriteRule index.php?proptype=Villa&action=search listing?holidaytype=Villa [L]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^proptype=Villa&action=search$
RewriteRule ^index.php listing?holidaytype=Villa [L]

The only lines above these in my .htaccess file are as follows:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Having checked a number of other related questions here and on other rewrite guidelines, I still can't get the rules working. What have I missed - or could it be another problem?

Graham

Answer 1

If you are "redirecting" old URLs then you should implement an external redirect, not an internal rewrite, as you have done here. (listing?holidaytype=Villa is unlikely to be a valid filesystem path - but that's possibly another issue.)

For example, try the following instead:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^proptype=Villa&action=search$
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /listing?holidaytype=Villa [R=302,L]

This is a temporary (302) redirect, only change it to a permanent (301) when you are sure it's working OK.