301 redirection removes UTM tags from URLs

Question

A page redirects to another page using a 301 redirect in a .htaccess file. If I try to access the page from a URL with UTM tagging, after redirection, it removes all UTM tagging.

Is this normal behavior? How can we keep the UTM tagging so that we can see this in our analytics?

Here are some examples:

Example 1:

http://example.com/page.html?utm_source=nosource&utm_medium=nomedium&utm_campaign=nocam

redirects to:

http://example.com/another-page.html

Example 2:

http://example.com/page.html?utm_source=nosource&utm_medium=nomedium&utm_campgn=nocam&page=1 (Just misspelled utm_camaign to check if utm_ is not just a culprit)

redirects to:

http://example.com/another-page.html?utm_campgn=nocam&page=1

Example 3:

http://example.com/page.html?utm_source=nosource&utm_medium=nomedium&utm_campaign=nocam&page=1

redirects to:

http://example.com/another-page.html?page=1

Example 4:

http://example.com/page.html?page=1

redirects to:

http://example.com/another-page.html?page=1

---

Excerpt from .htaccess:

RewriteRule ^home-living/furniture/([^/\.]+)\.html http://www.example.com/home-living/furniture/filter/cat/$1.h‌​tml [R=301,L]

Answer 1

If your .htaccess has RewriteRules like these:

RewriteRule page.html /another-page.html [NC,R=301,L]

It will always remove querystring parameters, that's default behaviour. You'll have to add QSA flag to your RewriteRule, like this:

RewriteRule page.html /another-page.html [NC,QSA,R=301,L]

Apache mod_rewrite doc
QSA|qsappend

Answer 2

RewriteRule ^home-living/furniture/([^/\.]+)\.html http://www.example.com/home-living/furniture/filter/cat/$1.h‌​tml [R=301,L]

This directive preserves the entire query string from the original request. It does not remove it, or any part of it. The query string is preserved by default with RewriteRule (and Redirect and RedirectMatch) directives. Only when you explicitly define a new query string on the substition (URL target) is the query string replaced (in its entirety). Only then would you need the QSA (Query String Append) flag in order to append the original query string to the query string stated in the substitution string in order to preserve it - if that is required.

What is described here in examples 2, 3 and 4 is selective removal of specific URL parameters. This is certainly not caused by the above directive. If this is caused by directives in .htaccess at all then there must be a specific section / group of directives elsewhere in the file (or server config) that does this. And this is likely resulting in at least two redirects (which would seem to be implied by your statement: "after redirection, it removes all UTM tagging").

However, if this is the case then I would also expect these utm_ parameters to be removed from any requested URL, regardless of whether that URL is redirected or not.

We would need to see the entire .htaccess file in order to progress with this further, otherwise, this is quite likely to be triggered elsewhere in the application logic, particularly if it's only occurring "after redirection".

Answer 3

I suggest you to add this line in you .htaccess files if you want to execute and delete the utm analytics from the URL

#REDIRECTION UTM CLEAR
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} "utm" [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) /$1? [R=301,L,QSD]
</IfModule>