.htaccess redirect not redirecting

Question

I am trying to Redirect pages to new location on the same website using .htaccess the physical file name is displayitems.php but there is a rule in .htaccess

RewriteRule ^buy-online-(.*) ./displayitems.php?url=$1

which is to handle the user friends URLs and works well.

Now i want to redirects these user friendly urls to new location which is on the same website for eg.

redirect https://example.com/buy-online-alhabib-rings4-sku-1658906163 https://example.com/products/jewelry/buy-online-alhabib-rings4-sku-1658906163 [R=301]

redirect https://example.com/buy-online-alhabib-rings3-sku-1658906162 https://example.com/products/jewelry/buy-online-alhabib-rings3-sku-1658906162 [R=301]

redirect https://example.com/buy-online-alhabib-rings2-sku-1658906161 https://example.com/products/jewelry/buy-online-alhabib-rings2-sku-1658906161 [R=301]

redirect https://example.com/buy-online-alhabib-rings1-sku-1658906160 https://example.com/products/jewelry/buy-online-alhabib-rings1-sku-1658906160 [R=301]

these user friendly url doesn't have any extensions like ".php" ".htm" etc

but nothing happening.

Answer 1

I have added this code in php file to check if url doesn't contain \products\ than redirect it to new location with the same name, for testing i just redirect it with 302 once all tested i will change it to 301

if (strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "/products/") === false) { $NewAddress = strtolower("Location:". $ini['website_address_https'] . "products/".$Product['categoriesname']."/".$Product['BrandName'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); header("$NewAddress",TRUE,302); }

Answer 2

redirect https://example.com/buy-online-alhabib-rings4-sku-1658906163 https://example.com/products/jewelry/buy-online-alhabib-rings4-sku-1658906163 [R=301]

There are 3 main issues here:

1. The mod_alias Redirect directive takes a root-relative URL-path (starting with a slash) as the source URL, not an absolute URL. So the above will never match.

2. You have mixed syntax with mod_rewrite. [R=301] is a RewriteRule (mod_rewrite) flags argument and has nothing to do with the mod_alias Redirect directive. Redirect takes the HTTP status code as an optional second argument. eg. Redirect 301 /buy-online-alhabib-rings4-sku-1658906163 ...

3. Since you are using mod_rewrite (ie. RewriteRule) for your internal rewrite, you should use mod_rewrite for external redirects as well to avoid potential conflicts. These redirects then need to go before your internal rewrite.

Additionally,

4. In the 4 redirects you have posted it looks like you are simply injecting /products/jewelry at the start of the URL-path. This does not need 4 separate rules, providing you are wanting to redirect all URLs that following this particular format.

Try the following instead:

RewriteEngine On

# Inject (redirect) "/product/jewelry" at the start of the URL-path
RewriteRule ^buy-online-alhabib-rings\d-sku-\d+$ /products/jewelry/$0 [R=301,L]

# Internal rewrite
RewriteRule ^buy-online-(.*) displayitems.php?url=$1 [L]

The $0 backreference in the first rule contains the entire URL-path that is matched by the RewriteRule pattern.

Note that I also removed ./ from the start of the substitution string in the last rule. This is unnecessary here.