301 Redirect for homepage with language code

[kwoolf]

In my multilingual Magento store, I want to redirect the hompage URL with an added language code to the base URL. For example, I want to redirect http://www.mysite.com/tw/ to http://www.mysite.com/ which has the exact same content.

Using a canonical URL will help with search engines, but I would just rather nip the problem in the butt by not showing http://www.mysite.com/tw/ to visitors in the first place. Problem is that I don't want (can't have) all /tw/ removed from URLs due to Magento limitations, so I just want to know how to redirect this single URL. Since rewrites are on, adding Redirect 301 /tw http://www.88kbbq.com would redirect all URLs with the /tw/ language code to ones without. Not an option.

Hope folks can lend a hand here.

[RyanKent]

How are you adding the 301? Directly into .htaccess? or with tool such as the Redirect app in cPanel?

I am not a htaccess expert but from my understanding there are two types of redirects related to your request: normal redirects, and wildcard redirects.

A normal redirect would apply only to a single URL, the one you add.

The behavior you are describing is a wildcard redirect. A wildcard redirect says to take any URLs which begin as http://www.88kbbq.com/tw and redirect them. That is the undesirable result you are trying to avoid.

[kwoolf]

Note that the current site doesn't have the issue I'm asking about. We're working on a new site with IE6 support (tears) and better address support for Taiwan. I usually use .htaccess for redirects but am open to any solution. Yes, I'm try to avoid the wildcard redirect--I only need www.88kbbq.com/tw to redirect to www.88kbbq.com so both visitors and search engines will never see the former. Thanks for your response. Hope to find a solution soon!

[kwoolf]

Ok, problem solved. The methodology in my question was apparently not the right approach. The structure should I had to set up a language folder /en/ and copy my index.php and .htaccess file to that location. Then I modified the index.php file to direct to the 'en' site and changed the base URL in the Magento backend to /en/. Also, I turned off 'add store code to URL'. Now my Taiwan visitors see http://www.88kbbq.com/ and visitors to the English site see http://www.88kbbq.com/en/. No redirects necessary.