How can I fix multiple 404 errors with Wildcard htaccess redirect

[Taiger]

Hi all I hope that someone can help....

How can I fix multiple 404 errors with Wildcard htaccess redirect

The url in question is:

How can I fix multiple 404 errors with Wildcard htaccess redirect

http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/listing/search/Category/luxury_hotels_venues_uk_wedding_venues/exclusive_use_venues/letter/c

http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/listing/location/uk-england/bedfordshire-weddings/franklin-park

http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/deal/location/uk-england/chorley-weddings/curtis-bay

etc, going to http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business

the above is just a few examples, google webmaster is showing over  8.000 404 page not found errors.

Thanks in advance.

[Matt-Williamson]

You can fix this issue much easier than trying to sort out redirects in htaccess. You are coming across this issue because your site uses relative URLs rather than absolute.

Example:

A relative URL isn't tied to a base URL so:

/business

Absolute would be:

www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business

Using relative means that when you visit a page your link is relative to that location so if I was on

www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business and visited the same llink it would become

www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business/business unless redirected.

Having to fix this issue in htaccess can get messy for this and it would be much simpler to change your nav links in the template of your site. I checked this was the case in your sites source code to be certain and you definitely use relative URLs.

[Taiger]

Hi Matt, and thank you for your response.

Not sure if i understand the solution to this problem though. The http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/listing/......./ are from old legacy urls, and we have many. I am not sure why google webmaster is still picking up these old urls. but having 8k old not found urls is a worry.

Regards Tai

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi Tai,

I had a look at your site homepage and from your examples I could see you have relative urls which can cause 404 errors and as you mentioned 8000 I thought this could be part of your problems - no domains in your main navigation links so /business rather than www.yourdomain.com/business in coding - so no base URL can cause this. I took one of your links you mentioned to check if your hrefs were relative.

Putting what I mentioned aside for a second do you just want anything that is /listing and /deal redirecting to /business?

Have you tried this for the listing example and repeat for the others such as /deal/:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/listing/.*$ http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business

[Taiger]

Hi Matt, thanks again.

Yes we are trying to redirect old urls to the relevant pages.

As we have so many old urls from old cms system which had different url structures, to do a wildcard to catch all 404s would be great. (wordpress plugin wp redirection achieves this http://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/)

RedirectMatch 301 ^/listing/.*$ http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business

But it did not redirect

http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/listing/location/uk-england/essex-weddings

Thanks for your time on this.

Regards Tai

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi Tai,

I understand what you are saying in regards to making it easier with all the different URLs, however you will need to specify some start point in terms of being one level down from the domain root else you are effectively placing a wildcard on the whole domain, which wouldn't work when you are still working on this domain. So you need to try to identify the few main category URLs such as /listing and so on in order to create a rule.

Did the redirect I give you work for all URLs apart from the one listed? It should have worked for that.

An alternative you can try is:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^listing/(.*)$ http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business/ [R=301,L]

[Taiger]

Hi Matt,

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^listing/(.*)$ http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business/ [R=301,L]

Did not work,

other urls flagged up in Google WM are/deal/ new: /deals/

http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/deal/location/uk-england/buckinghamshire-weddings/newport-beach

http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/deals/

thanks Matt

[Matt-Williamson]

Using the redirectmatch directive to redirect the entire deal directory to deals should definitely work for your situation. You then just repeat for each - so for deals:

RedirectMatch 301 /deal/(.*) /deals/$1

[Taiger]

Hi Matt, sorry for the delay in getting back.

Just working on your suggestions, I will let you know if it works

T

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Tai! Any update on this issue? Please let us know so we can help! Thanks.

Christy

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Tai, were you able to implement Matt's suggestions?

[Taiger]

Hi Denverish, thanks for your reply, been months since i looked at this problem. It has returned so trying to sort it out. the redirects mentioned did not work. so any suggestions.

The CMS allows for 301 redirects via a form; place old url at the top of the form and the new url at the bottom and save,

But as I am trying to create a wildcard 301 redirect, i am not sure what code to place in these fields..see pic

tai

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