Htaccess - Redirecting TAG or Category pages

[Jes-Extender-Australia]

Hello Fellow Moz's,

We have an issue redirecting some /TAG and /Category pages to inner pages.

As an example we use:

RedirectMatch 301 /category/Sample-Category(.*) https://OurDomain.com.au/New-Page//$1

That works well.

The issue is we have other categories and tags that are named similar to /Sample-Category

As an example, if we try to redirect /Sample-Category-1 to /New-Page-1 - it will not work, and redirects to /New-Page

I assume this is because /Sample-Category is already being redirected, so anything after /Sample-Category like -1 or -2 or -3 etc, will not be recognized.

Anyone know of a workaround?

[seoman10]

If I've understood you correctly, all you need to do is to add a tag with the relevant content same as the old one.

[Jes-Extender-Australia]

It's not as easy as that unfortunately.

I will reiterate.....If we redirect.....

RedirectMatch 301 /category/Blue-Shirts https://OurDomain.com.au**/Blue-Shirts**//$1 - it works, BUT....if we redirect another similar category page to different inner page like....

RedirectMatch 301 /category/Blue-Shirts-Size-30 https://OurDomain.com.au****/Blue-Shirts-Size-30****//$1 - it redirects to the first inner page example above.

That's why I was assuming it's not working because in the second example the sever sees /Blue-Shirts and ignores everything after it i.e the "Size-30".

Hopefully that makes it clearer?

[ThompsonPaul]

The regex in your RedirectMatch doesn't say what you think it says, Jes

This part (note the bolded part of the expression (.*)

/category/Sample-Category**(.*)**

doesn't actually say "match the URL that is specifically** /category/Sample-Category"**

That**.*** is a wildcard thatmeans "and any other additional characters that might occur here"

So what it's saying is "match the URL /category/Sample-Category _**as well as **_any URLs that have any additional characters after the letter "y" in category. Which is what is catching your -1 variation of the URL (or the -size-30 in your second example).

In addition, that wildcard has been set as a variable (the fact it's in brackets), which you are then attempting to insert into the end of the new URL (with the $1), which I don't think is your intent.

Instead, try:

RedirectMatch 301 /category/Sample-Category https://OurDomain.com.au/New-Page/

you should get the redirect you're looking for, and not have it interfere with the other ones you wish to write.

Let me know if that solves the issue? Or if I've misunderstood why you were trying to include the wildcard variable?

Paul

P.S. You'll need to be very specific whether the origin or target URLs use trailing slashes - I just replicated the examples you provided.