What are the best strategies to organize a htaccess full of 301 re-directs

[anchorwave]

I have a client with a htaccess file that is a total mess!

What are the best practices to organize all the re-directs, and make it more manageable in the future.

Any resources would be appreciated.

[EGOL]

We have a site that is categorized by folder so we place separate .htaccess files in each folder... that keeps them relatively small instead of placing all of redirects in the root.

[joseph.chambers]

Do you have root access to the server? If you do then a rewrite map is a lot faster then a bunch of rewrite rules & conditions.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewritemap

You can always just add comments with the hash tag: # what each thing does and group them. That would be cleaner.