Htaccess Issue: URL not resolving properly

[inhouseseo]

I am merging a niche site, tshirts.com to another site mainsite.com.

I am using an htaccess file on a linux server, and the homepage of the niche site is being directed to the corresponding category page on the main site (i.e nichesite.com to mainsite.com/niche.html). Everything else is also a page to page redirect.

I have something like this in the htaccess file:

Redirect 301 http://tshirts.com/ http://www.mainsite.com/tshirts.html
Redirect 301 http://tshirts.com/blue.html  http://www.lampclick.com/blue-t-shirts.html
Redirect 301 http://tshirts.com/white.html http://www.mainsite.com/white-t-shirts.html
Redirect 301 http://tshirts.com/black-tshirts.html http://www.mainsite.com/bk-t-shirts.html

When I check 301 for lets say http://tshirts.com/blue.html, I get:

http://tshirts.com/blue.html -** 301 Moved Permanently**

http://www.mainsite.com/tshirts.htmlblue.html -** 302 Found**

http:www.mainsite.com/

How do I fix this? Why is everything being appended to minsite/tshirts.html?

I appreciate your help.

[Keszi]

Hi there,

Redirects should always be written in a relative to absolute path.

So the .htaccess file for http://tshirts.com/ should contain something like:

Redirect 301 / http://www.mainsite.com/tshirts.html
Redirect 301 /blue.html  http://www.lampclick.com/blue-t-shirts.html
Redirect 301 /white.html http://www.mainsite.com/white-t-shirts.html
Redirect 301 /black-tshirts.html http://www.mainsite.com/bk-t-shirts.html

I think that should solve the issue.

Keszi

[TheeDigital]

The problem is the order here. Remember that redirects fire from top down. In this case, you're telling it to redirect the main page, then redirect the secondary page, so what you get is / redirects to http://www.mainsite.com/tshirts.html and then it tries to redirect /blue.html but it's already done the previous redirect, so it tries to append blue.html to this and you end up with what you did, http://www.mainsite.com/tshirts.htmlblue.html