.htaccess 301 redirect

A few clarifications and safer options to complement @arooney’s follow-up and @Tiggerito’s SEO point.

The behavior that surprises people usually comes from how Apache’s simple Redirect works: it will append the unmatched portion of the request to the target URL and rules are applied in order. That means a broad “catch‑all” redirect placed before page‑specific rules can mask the latter and produce unexpected target paths. Also remember that per‑directory (.htaccess) context can change what the left‑hand path actually matches.

Two concise alternatives that avoid the common pitfalls (replace the example target with the real landing page):

Redirect all requests to a single landing page (mod_alias / RedirectMatch)

RedirectMatch 301 ^/(.*)$ http://www.example.com/newpage

Safer mod_rewrite version that avoids redirect loops (useful if the new page lives on the same host)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/newpage$
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.example.com/newpage [R=301,L]

Troubleshooting checklist: confirm the rule file is in the site’s DocumentRoot (and that AllowOverride + the relevant module are enabled), test redirects with curl -I to inspect the Location/Status headers, use a temporary 302 during testing because browsers aggressively cache 301s, and put specific redirects before any catch‑all. On the SEO side, be aware that mass‑redirecting many disparate pages to one unrelated page can be treated poorly by search engines (mapping old pages to relevant new content or returning proper 404/410 is preferable where appropriate).

These points explain why the initial Redirects can act oddly and offer two reliable patterns to perform a site‑wide permanent redirect while avoiding loops and unexpected appended paths.