Multiple pages under single directory redirection to a single Page

Multiple pages under single directory redirection to a single Page - If a page has internal and external outgoing links to redirecting URLs, it’s returning 3xx (301, 302, etc.) HTTP status codes standing for redirection. This issue means that the page does not exist on a permanent or temporary basis. It appears on most of the popular web browsers, usually caused by a misconfigured website. However, there are some steps you can take to ensure the issue isn’t on your side. You can find more details about redirecting URLs by reading the Google Search Central overview. In this article, we’ll go over how you can fix the Multiple pages under single directory redirection to a single Page error on your web browser. Problem :

I have the following scenarios for web page redirects

1) All pages under www.oldexamplesite.com/page/product/New-Design/* and All pages under www.oldexamplesite.com/page/product/nature-of-design-purchase/*

should be redirected to https://www.testexamplesite.com/subjects/book/business-studies/

2) Pages like http://www.oldexamplesite.com/engine.jsp and
http://www.oldexamplesite.com/engine.jsp?page=catalogues&portal=books should be redirected to https://www.testexamplesite.com . There are multiple pages with http://www.oldexamplesite.com/engine.jsp?* which should be redirected to https://www.testexamplesite.com

3) All pages under www.oldexamplesite.com/page/product/Old-Design/* and All pages under www.oldexamplesite.com/page/product/nature-of-olddesign-purchase/*

should be redirected to https://www.testexamplesite.com/subjects/book/business-oldstudies/ .

To implement the above scenarios I tried the following redirect rules

   RewriteCond %REQUEST_URI ^/page/product/New-Design/* [NC,OR]
   RewriteCond %REQUEST_URI ^/page/product/nature-of-design-purchase/* [NC,OR]
   RewriteRule ^/.*$ https://www.testexamplesite.com/subjects/book/business-studies/ [R=302,L]

   RewriteCond %REQUEST_URI ^/engine.jsp* [NC]
   RewriteRule ^/.*$ https://www.testexamplesite.com/subjects/book/business-studies/ [R=302,L]

   RewriteCond %REQUEST_URI ^/page/product/Old-Design/* [NC,OR]
   RewriteCond %REQUEST_URI ^/page/product/nature-of-olddesign-purchase/* [NC,OR]
   RewriteRule ^/.*$ https://www.testexamplesite.com/subjects/book/business-oldstudies/ [R=302,L]

With the above rules the redirections are not happening. So, please suggest how to make the redirections work .

Update:

Point 2) Pages like http://www.oldexamplesite.com/engine.jsp?page=fruits&portal=apples and
http://www.oldexamplesite.com/engine.jsp?page=catalogues&portal=books should be redirected to https://www.testexamplesite.com . Besides above two there are multiple jsp pages starting with http://www.oldexamplesite.com/engine.jsp?........ which should be redirected to https://www.testexamplesite.com but there should but no redirection for http://www.oldexamplesite.com/engine.jsp

Solution :

You are close, but there are some errors:

RewriteRule ^/.*$ ....

In .htaccess, the URL-path matched by the RewriteRule pattern does not start with a slash, so this should be simply ^.*$ (or even just .* - since regex is greedy by default), not ^/.*$. By including the slash prefix, it will never match, so the directive does nothing. (You would need the slash prefix in a server or virtualhost context.)

RewriteCond %REQUEST_URI ^/page/product/New-Design/* [NC,OR]

The CondPattern (2nd argument to the RewriteCond directive) is a regex. The trailing * looks like you are treating like a wildcard expression. The * at the end matches the previous character 0 or more times, so in this case it is matching a slash 0 or more times - so again, this is not going to match the URLs you want to redirect. You should either use .* (to match 0 or more of any character: the dot), or omit it entirely, since you only need to match URLs that start with that URL-path.

RewriteCond %REQUEST_URI ^/page/product/New-Design/* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %REQUEST_URI ^/page/product/nature-of-design-purchase/* [NC,OR]
RewriteRule ^/.*$ https://www.testexamplesite.com/subjects/book/business-studies/ [R=302,L]

You should never include the OR flag on the last condition. This is essentially saying OR true and the rule will execute unconditionally (that is, if the RewriteRule pattern matched).

 RewriteCond %REQUEST_URI ^/engine.jsp* [NC]
 RewriteRule ^/.*$ https://www.testexamplesite.com/subjects/book/business-studies/ [R=302,L]

The REQUEST_URI server variable does not contain the query string, so if you want to match any query string then you don't need to do anything in this respect, you just need to match the required URL-path. (To specifically match the query string you need a condition that checks against the QUERY_STRING server variable.)

Also, where possible it is more efficient to perform the necessary URL-path checks in the RewriteRule pattern, rather than using an additional RewriteCond (condition) directive. So, the above could be rewritten as a single directive:

 RewriteRule ^engine.jsp$ https://www.testexamplesite.com/subjects/book/business-studies/ [R=302,L]

Remember to escape literal dots in the regex. You did state in your question that this should redirect to https://www.testexamplesite.com, not https://www.testexamplesite.com/subjects/book/business-studies/, as you've stated here?

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In Summary

So, bringing this together, try the following instead. Note that these directives need to go before the WordPress front-controller, at the top of the .htaccess file.

RewriteRule ^page/product/(new-design|nature-of-design-purchase)/ https://www.testexamplesite.com/subjects/book/business-studies/ [NC,R=302,L]

RewriteRule ^engine.jsp$ https://www.testexamplesite.com/ [NC,R=302,L]

RewriteRule ^page/product/(old-design|nature-of-olddesign-purchase)/ https://www.testexamplesite.com/subjects/book/business-oldstudies/ [R=302,L]

Note that I removed the end-of-string anchor ($) from the RewriteRule pattern. And changed the pattern to lowercase, since you have the NC (nocase) flag anyway.

UPDATE#1: To redirect only when a query string is present on the /engine.jsp URL you’ll need to add a condition to the middle rule that checks against the QUERY_STRING server variable. For example:

RewriteCond %QUERY_STRING .
RewriteRule ^engine.jsp$ https://www.testexamplesite.com/ [NC,QSD,R=302,L]

The regex (a single dot) in the CondPattern ensures that the query string is present on the request.

The QSD flag (Apache 2.4+) is required to discard the query string from the redirected response.

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UPDATE#2: Sorry , If I have missed to add earlier, for this requirement we are using Virtualhosts directive and not .htaccess

In that case you will need to match a slash prefix on the URL-path in the RewriteRule pattern. This is because in a virtualhost (or server) context, the RewriteRule directive matches against the full URL-path, not a relative URL-path (that is relative to the directory of where the .htaccess file is contained).

So, finally we have:

RewriteRule ^/page/product/(new-design|nature-of-design-purchase)/ https://www.testexamplesite.com/subjects/book/business-studies/ [NC,R=302,L]

RewriteCond %QUERY_STRING .
RewriteRule ^/engine.jsp$ https://www.testexamplesite.com/ [NC,QSD,R=302,L]

RewriteRule ^/page/product/(old-design|nature-of-olddesign-purchase)/ https://www.testexamplesite.com/subjects/book/business-oldstudies/ [R=302,L]

NB: These directives can be made to work in both contexts (ie. server and directory) by making the slash prefix in the RewriteRule pattern optional. eg. ^/?engine.jsp$.

We hope that this article has helped you resolve the redirects, mod-rewrite, apache2 error in your web browsers. Enjoy browsing the internet uninterrupted!