Question 22573 in SEO Question posted in
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Apache / .htaccess | Rewriting a URL but the old URL still remains? – SEO

I have kind of an unusual setup with my website:

  • site.tld = Gatsby Website with some static pages like /example1 and /example2, etc.
  • site.tld/blog = A WordPress website

Now I wanted to have users visit a new page site.tld/mynewpage which ACTUALLY is a page on the WordPress website. So the actual URL is site.tld/blog/mynewpage.

To achieve that I have defined this rule:

RewriteRule ^mynewpage/$ /blog/mynewpage/ [L]

Which kind of works. It lets me successfully see the desired wordpress page, when I browse to site.tld/mynewpage.

My expactation would’ve been that if I now browse to site.tld/blog/mynewpage, it would either give me a 404 or it would "auto-redirect" to site.tld/mynewpage. But none of that happens. The address bar still says site.tld/blog/mynewpage and I see that page correctly. So now I have two links pointing to mynewpage. For SEO thats not a big deal, since I can set the canonical URL to be site.tld/mynewpage, but it bothers me, that this "old URL" site.tld/blog/mynewpage is still around.

Is there a way to fix that? I naively tried to do a redirect from site.tld/blog/mynewpage to site.tld/mynewpage but that gave me a "too many redirects", which I think is because it’s an infinite loop.

Any help appreciated =)

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2

Answers


  1. 0

    Add 301 redirection to your old URL – site.tld/blog/mynewpage to site.tld/mynewpage

    301 redirection can be added via .htaccess like below

    Redirect 301 /oldurl/ http://www.example.com/newurl/

    or you can try using the below code if you have custom php page

    <?php
header("Location: https://www.example.com/newurl", true, 301);
exit();
?>
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  2. 0

    You need to make sure you only redirect "direct" requests back to the root and not the rewritten request by your existing rewrite in the root .htaccess file (which will result in a redirect loop).

    Add the following to the top of the /blog/.htaccess file:

    RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} ^$
RewriteRule ^mynewpage/$ /$0 [R=301,L]

    This assumes the URL has a trailing slash, as in your "working" rewrite directive. However, all your examples have omitted the trailing slash?

    At first glance, this might "look" like it’s redirecting to the same URL, however, because the .htaccess file is in the subdirectory it does remove the subdirectory from the redirected URL. ie. It redirects from /blog/mynewpage/ to /mynewpage/.

    The RewriteRule pattern matches the URL-path relative to the location of the .htaccess file. So, since we are in the /blog subdirectory, the regex ^mynewpage/$ matches a request for /blog/mynewpage/. And we redirect back to /mynewpage/ using the $0 backreference, which contains the URL-path that was matched by the RewriteRule pattern.

    The check against the REDIRECT_STATUS environment variable ensures that only direct requests (from the client) are redirected and not rewritten requests by your existing rewrite.

    NB: Test first with a 302 (temporary) redirect to avoid caching issues.

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