Need some help with a tricky 301

[DanDeceuster]

I can't find anything online that deals with this issue. I have a page getting indexed by Google at mydomain.com/widgets and I don't know why. No links to it anywhere. The page it is closest to is mydomain.com/reviews/widgets and so I tried to set up a 301 to point one to the other.

The problem is each individual widget review is at mydomain.com/widgets/reviews/products/widget-name and so when I redirect /widgets to mydomain.com/reviews/widgets it also redirects each individual product to mydomain.com/reviews/widgets/reviews/products/widget-name.

Is there some way to just redirect /widgets without having it affect each product review? I cannot change URL structure either, nature of the site. Any ideas?

[ShaMenz]

Hi Daniel,

Whenever I hear "Nothing is redirecting when I add this to the .htaccess file" I have one thought:

Is the site using Joomla, Drupal or some other CMS that will overwrite .htaccess rules externally?

Sha

[DanDeceuster]

Just not happening. I'm just not going to worry about it, thanks for your help

[JasonCook]

Gotcha. Try adding the rewriteengine on line directly above those two rules. That has to be present to trigger the mod_rewrite module. Hopefully that will solve the issue.

[DanDeceuster]

Yeah I took the ReweriteEngine On line out and just added the RewriteRule line in underneat that one. Although it doesn't say anywhere RewriteEngine On in the .htaccess file already, so not sure how that works.

[JasonCook]

Well, that's no fun. If there is already a line to initiate the rewrite engine, that 2nd 'rewriteengine on' reference could be a problem. I assume you took that out?

[DanDeceuster]

It is not working for me. Nothing is redirecting when I add this to the .htaccess file. First I added it as you suggested at the bottom of everything. Nothing happened so I added right after another line of code that was already in there that started with RewriteRule. This is the line that was already there:

RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [NC,L]

Any idea what could be going wrong? Thanks in advance!

[JasonCook]

Hi Daniel - Are you using htaccess to handle your redirects.  I think you'll need to employ some Regular Expressions to handle what you're trying to accomplish.  As a guide, here is a very nice writeup on RegEx from - where else - SEOmoz: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-seos-guide-to-regex

so, in this case, i think what you'll want is:

RewriteEngine On

**RewriteRule ^widgets/?$ reviews/widgets [NC]**so, the caret (^) ensures that the url starts with widgets, while the dollar sign ensures that the redirect rule stops there (eliminating that pesky problem you encountered with the review pages also getting redirected).  The ? just means that the trailing slash is optional.Hope that helps.  If this solution isn't feasible, you could always hedge with rel="canonical" on the mydomain.com/widgets page and have that point to the proper page.  That will at least help with Google.-Jason