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I wish to set up some 301 redirects to new URLs and I am trying to do this with the redirect facility in cPanel. For some reason the requests are not being processed correctly and I am guessing that this is because the old URLs are query based.

It looks like I will have to modify my .htaccess file manually and my question is: what is the correct syntax to use, based on the examples given below.

http://www.mydomain.com/products.asp?category=42 needs redirecting to http://www.mydomain.com/products/new-category.

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cPanel will also not be able to determine whether you have other conflicting directives in your .htaccess file.

The RewriteRule pattern matches against the URL-path part of the URL so you will need to use a RewriteCond directive with the %{QUERY_STRING} variable.

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} =category=42
RewriteRule ^products\.asp /products/new-category? [R=301,L]

The = at the start of the RewriteCond pattern essentially performs an exact (string) match (if that is required).

The ? on the end of the RewriteRule substitution removes the querystring from the request, otherwise it will be passed through unchanged.

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  • RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^category=5$ [NC] RewriteRule ^products\.asp$ /products/new-category? [R=301,NE,NC,L]
    – MrPaulDriver
    Nov 14, 2013 at 9:56
  • I came across a useful tool (link below) which produces slightly different output, as in the comment above. Both solution seem to work. Is first suggestion above the better option? seo-website-designer.com/…
    – MrPaulDriver
    Nov 14, 2013 at 10:08
  • "Is first suggestion above the better option?" Yes. ;) To be honest there's not much in it, they both do the same thing. With mod_rewrite and particularly regex there can be several ways to achieve the same goal. However... ^category=5$ is a regex, as opposed to a simple string, as in my example. You don't appear to need a regex and are in fact doing an exact match so I would use the = (exact match) operator. NC (nocase) makes the comparison case-insensitive. Unless you specifically need this to be case-insensitive then don't use it. NE (noescape) is also unnecessary in this instance.
    – MrWhite
    Nov 15, 2013 at 3:56

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