[SOLVED] Site Migrate Old Urls to New Urls - issue with rewriting

[prestatent]

PS 1.6.0.8

 

Hello

 

We are migrating one of our sites from 1.5 to 1.6.

 

We have changed some of the categories and products within these categories, so some product-ids and category-id are different. So that we don't lose any of our SEO ranking I am going to rewrite all the old URL links for products to new ones within the .htaccess file. However I'm having a problem that hopefully someone can help me with. The following line in my .htaccess file I think should work:

 

RewriteRule ^old-category/262-product-test.html$  new-category/254-product-test.html [R=301,NC]

 

The product-id is 262 on the old site, but on the new site it's 254. Using this rule and typing in the url:

 

- old-category/262-product-test.html

 

I would expect it to reroute to url - new-category/254-product-test.html.

 

However what actually happens is that the url is redirected to new-category/262-different-product.html. The same product-id, but a different product.

 

Is my rewrite rule wrong (this could be a tongue-twister!!!), or is there something else I have to do in my .htaccess file.

 

Note: I have placed this rule at the bottom of the .htaccess file outwith the comment lines.

 

Thank you for any help.

 

 

 

Edited June 12, 2015 by prestatent (see edit history)

[prestatent]

Any offers?

[mickeyboy1]

Does This help: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27389500/htaccess-301-redirect-to-new-category-showing-old-category-with-new-url

[blackarma]

You should end your rewrites with L flag, and also if you keep getting more problems i'm sure people can help if you post whole rewrite statements block.

 

RewriteRule ^old-category/262-product-test.html$  new-category/254-product-test.html [L,R=301,NC]
or
RewriteRule ^old-category/262-product-test\.html$  new-category/254-product-test.html [L,R=301,NC]

P.S: If it's your last rule, you need to check if no other rule intercepts beforehand. Edited June 11, 2015 by blackarma (see edit history)

[prestatent]

Thanks Mickeyboy & Blackarma. Appreciate your help on this.

 

I've placed this code at the start of the file, outwith the stuff that would get overwritten by PS. I'm running this on localhost at the moment. This is the whole block.

 

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^localhost$

RewriteRule ^old-category/262-product-test.html$  http://localhost/new-category/254-product-test.html [R=301,NC,L]

 

The good news is that the above statements work. We run a multi-language site (6 languages), and I notice that if the language is appended to the url before the category the original issue still occurs. Any idea why this would be? eg. typing this into the browser works:

 

http://localhost/test/old-category/262-product-test.html

 

but this

 

http://localhost/test/gb/old-category/262-product-test.html

 

reroutes to gb/new-category/262-different-product.html. The same product-id, but a different product which was the original issue.

 

So, I've now worked out that if I put the language in the old url it will work correctly, but as I have 6 languages on the site, do I then have to have 6 reroutes for each product?

 

 

I'm sure there must be a way around this, but as our products are all indexed with the language in the url, I'll have to get it working

[blackarma]

You would need to capture 2 of first symbols, then use it in redirect.

 

Are language parameter always present in url?
If so then you can do something like:
 

^([a-z]{2})/old-category/262-product.html$ $1/new-product/272-product.html [R=301,NC,L]

If not you will need to make non greedy slash capture also

Too bad i have no servers on apache so it's hard to guess like that from my head.

[prestatent]

Hi

 

Yes the language parameter is always present.

 

I'll give this a try and let you know how I get on as this would save a lot of hassle.

 

Cheers

[prestatent]

Thank you Blackarma,that works correctly as far as I can see. Well done. Appreciate your time and knowledge.

 

Cheers