Using Reg Ex to 301 old categories and query strings in Magento

[Tone_Agency]

Hi SEOmoz community!

I'm hoping somebody with a little Magento and Reg Ex knowledge will be able to help me out here.

I need to 301 some old categories along with their old query strings. Below is an example.

Old URL

/bed-linen/pillowcases-html.html

Users can then filter by price or range which then creates a query string such as...

/bed-linen/pillowcases-html.html?price=1%2C10

New URL:

/bed-linen/pillowcases.html

So the new query string will be

/bed-linen/pillowcases.html?price=1%2C10

Does anybody know the Reg Ex to 301 this? Can this be done in Magento re-write module or by htaccess only?

Thanks in advance

Anthony

@Anthony_Mac85

[danrawk]

I'd suggest checking with your host. I'm not sure if your reference to reg ex means "reg ex" in the sense of it being reforwarding software, or in the sense of using regular expressions to type syntax to handle it.

most hosts will have reforwarding software of some sort installed with their user accounts (the 301 thing is pretty common). once they let you know what it is (for example it might be apache's mod-rewrite or isapirewrite.com), you can figure out the format you need to write the rewrite commands in.  some of them use IIS, some of them use .htacess, it all just depends.

if your old url and new urls are in respective "structures" you may also be able to put in wildcards to handle the directory words all at once.

[Tone_Agency]

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

Yeh I mean regular expression, it's apache mod-rewrite and we use .htaccess

I'm struggling to figure out to 301 old url query strings to the new ones. There are several possible query strings for each product category so would take forever to do them one by one in magento re-write. The query strings will be the same i.e. ?price=1%2C10 but the category url will be different as you can see in my example above.

any ideas or do I need to hire an expert?

Thanks