Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis
      Moz Pro

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. 301 redirect with /? in URL

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    301 redirect with /? in URL

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4
    5
    2137
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • COEDMediaGroup
      COEDMediaGroup last edited by

      For a Wordpress site that has the ending / in the URL with a ? after it... how can you do a 301 redirect to strip off anything after the /

      For example how to take this URL

      domain.com/article-name/?utm_source=feedburner

      and 301 to this URL

      domain.com/article-name/

      Thank you for the help

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Aleyda
        Aleyda @COEDMediaGroup last edited by

        Hi Robert,

        The rewrite rules shared by Patrick should work well for that although you could also use Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin that features options to do that through the control panel.

        Nonetheless, in general what can be better in performance and also for tracking purposes with your site URL, leaving tracking parameters while avoiding content duplication content is to use canonical tags. You can also set them easily for Wordpress with Yoast's plugin.

        I hope this helps!

        Aleyda

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
        • AmberRobinson
          AmberRobinson last edited by

          Have you tried the Redirection tool when you login to the back-end of the site?

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • COEDMediaGroup
            COEDMediaGroup last edited by

            Just looking to remove it. Thanks for the info, will see if this works.

            Aleyda 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • StreamlineMetrics
              StreamlineMetrics last edited by

              Do you want to capture the parameter value or do you want to just remove it immediately? If you want to remove it without worrying about capturing the value in Google Analytics, then this code may work -

              RewriteEngine On
              RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !="" #if there is a query string
              RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^p=.* #wordpress users: allow post tempalinks
              RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wp-admin.* #wordpress users: don't break admin
              RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1? [R=301,L] #remove query string

              I got this code from http://briancray.com/posts/htaccess-hack-remove-url-query-strings/

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              Browse Questions

              Explore more categories

              • Moz Tools

                Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

              • SEO Tactics

                Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

              • Community

                Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

              • Digital Marketing

                Chat about tactics outside of SEO

              • Research & Trends

                Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

              • Support

                Connect on product support and feature requests.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • dsbud

                301 redirect hops from non-https and www

                It's best practice to minimize the amount of 301 redirect hops. Ideally only one redirect hop. It's also best practice to 301 redirect (or at least canonical) your non-https and/or your non-www (or www) to the canonical protocol/subdomain. The simplest (and possibly the most common) way to implement canonical protocol/subdomain redirects is through a load balancer or before your app processes the request. Both of which will just blanket 301 to the canonical domain/protocol regardless if the path exists or not In which case, you could have: Two hops. i.e. hop #1 http://example.com/foo to https://example.com/foo, hop #2 https://example.com/foo to https://example.com/bar 301 to a 404. Let's say https://example.com/dog never existed, but somebody for whatever reason linked to it (maybe a typo). If I request https://www.example.com/dog, the load balancer would 301 to a 404 page. Either scenario above should be fairly rare. However, you can't control how people link to you. Should I care about either above scenario? I could have my app attempt to check if the page exists before forwarding, but that code could be complicated.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsbud
                0
              • kirbyf

                Website Redesign, 301 Redirects, and Link Juice

                I want to change my client’s ecommerce site to Shopify. The only problem is that Shopify doesn’t let you customize domains. I plan to: keep each page’s content exactly the same keep the same domain name 301 redirect all of the pages to their new url The ONLY thing that will change is each page’s url. Again, each page will have the exact same content. The only source of traffic to this site is via Google organic search and sales depend on the traffic. There are about 10 pages that have excellent link juice, 20 pages that have medium link juice, and the rest is small link juice. Many of our links that have significant link juice are on message boards written by people that like our product. I plan to change these urls and 301 redirect them to their new urls. I’ve read tons of pages online about this topic. Some people that say it won’t effect link juice at all, some say it will might effect link juice temporarily, and others are uncertain. Most answers tend to be “You should be good. You might lose some traffic temporarily. You might want to switch some of your urls to the new structure to see how it affects it first.” Here’s my question: 1) Has anyone ever done changed a url structure for an existing website with link juice? What were your results and do you have a definitive answer on the topic? 2) How much link juice (if any) will be lost if I keep all of the exact content the same but only change each page’s url? 3) If link juice is temporarily lost and then regained, how long will it be temporarily lost? 1 week? 1 month? 6 months? Thanks.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirbyf
                0
              • BrandBuilder

                New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?

                We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder
                0
              • Sandicliffe

                301 Redirect Showing Up as Thousands Of Backlinks?

                Hi Everyone, I'm currently doing quite a large back link audit on my company's website and there's one thing that's bugging me. Our website used to be split into two domains for separate areas of the business but since we have merged them together into one domain and have 301 redirected the old domain the the main one. But now, both GWT and Majestic are telling me that I've got 12,000 backlinks from that domain?  This domain didn't even have 12,000 pages when it was live and I only did specific 301 redirects (ie. for specific URL's and not an overall domain level 301 redirect) for about 50 of the URL's with all the rest being redirected to the homepage. Therefore I'm quite confused about why its showing up as so many backlinks - Old redirects I've done don't usually show as a backlink at all. UPDATE: I've got some more info on the specific back links. But now my question is - is having this many backlinks/redirects from a single domain going to be viewed negatively in Google's eyes? I'm currently doing a reconsideration request and would look to try and fix this issue if having so many backlinks from a single domain would be against Google's guidelines. Does anybody have any ideas? Probably somthing very obvious. Thanks! Sam

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sandicliffe
                0
              • Travis-W

                Multiple 301 Redirects for the Same Page

                Hi Mozzers, What happens if I have a trail of 301 redirects for the same page? For example,
                SiteA.com/10 --> SiteA.com/11 --> SiteA.com/13 --> SiteA.com/14 I know I lose a little bit of link juice by 301 redirecting.
                The question is, would the link juice look like this for the example above? 100% --> 90% --> 81% -->72.9%
                Or just 100% -----------------------------------------> 90% Does this link juice refer to juice from inbound links or links between internal pages on my site? Thanks!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
                0
              • MyNet

                How To 301 Redirect .html pages

                I need to redirect a page/URL that is purely .html to a new location.  I don't know how to do this.  All the redirects I can find are for server side code pages .php/.aspx etc.  From my understanding I can't put a server side redirect in a .html file.  I am hosting on a microsoft server, however the new page I am redirecting to is .php.  I am running some WordPress (.php) files on the server.  I need to make it redirect before the old page loads so visitors don't start reading something that is about to get redirected Can someone please help me?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet
                0
              • pbhatt

                301 Redirects After Company Acquisition

                We recently acquired a company, and now we are going to redirect all of the pages on their site to their respective pages on our site. Do we need to keep the original pages on their site active? For how long? Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible? Thanks!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt
                1
              • pepsimoz

                Htaccess Redirect with %C2%A0 in URL

                Below is my setup for redirects in .htaccess file in my root word press installation. The www to non-www works well, so no problems there Other page redirects work well, too (example: redirect 301 /some-page/ http://mysite.com/another-page/ (I didn't post those because I have a few too many : ) So here it goes... RewriteEngine On
                RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.com$ [NC]
                RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L] BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
                RewriteBase /
                RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
                RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
                RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
                RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress redirect 301 /archives/10-college- majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%20majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ I'm having a problem with the last 301 redirect: redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ not working... As you can see I've tried using other varations of the "space" but no go. I also used a redirect in cPanel's Redirect screen; testing all the possible options + wildcard I've also tried this: http://serverfault.com/questions/201829/using-special-characters-in-apache-mod-rewrite-rule (perhaps unsuccessfully, because it caused a 500 server error and it's a different situation in my case) I also saw something here: http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3908682.htm but I don't know if it works and how I would implement that + do so without compromising ALL other redirects. Note: the URL displays with a space in the address bar of all major web browsers: http://mysite.com/10-college- majors/  and goes to a 404 page I have a goregous page / PR6 / high authority site linking to the URL on my site, but they copied the URL with a space somehow. I contacted the person responsible for the website and he claims it works fine (aka he didn't check it). Is there a clean way to redirect ONLY this problematic URL without compromising other redirects, etc? Any ideas would be great. I'll respond with progress. Thanks in advance. UPDATE the   redirect works, and it did work. Even so, when looking at source of page linking to mine, the URL looks like this: ``` http://mysite.com/archives/10-college- majors/ Clicking the URL in Source View in FireFox takes me to ``` http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ none of my 301 redirects should direct there. I don't have any redirect plugins either.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pepsimoz
                0

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              • Digital Marketers
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter
              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.