Member Avatar for jhellein

Rebuilt an existing site:

Old site used aspx pages, for example:
(broken)

New site is in Joomla; new link is:
http://americascarshow.com/gadgetcentral

I tried a 301 redirect in .htaccess file but cld not get it to work.

I need a solution to redirect links to new pages and/or at least get them to redirect to the site's homepage.

Thanks in advance for any help!

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Member #120589

Dani AI

Generated

Short answer: the simple Redirect directive only matches the path portion of the request and does not see anything after the ?. As guessed, you need mod_rewrite (regex) to inspect the query string. Below are small, practical options you can drop into the site root .htaccess on your Apache server and test.

Example — redirect that specific old Detail.aspx request to the new Joomla path (permanent 301):

RewriteEngine On

# Detail.aspx?dct=11&mid=1656  ->  /gadgetcentral
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (?:^|&)dct=11(?:&|$) [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (?:^|&)mid=1656(?:&|$) [NC]
RewriteRule ^Detail\.aspx$ /gadgetcentral? [R=301,L]

Notes: each RewriteCond checks the query-string (order doesn’t matter); the trailing ? in the substitution strips the old query string. On Apache 2.4+ you can use the [QSD] flag instead of the ?.

If you just want a simple catch-all that sends any .aspx request that carries a query string to the homepage (useful as a fallback):

# any .aspx with a querystring -> homepage (drop qs)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \.aspx$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} .
RewriteRule ^ /? [R=301,L]

If you have many old mid → new-slug mappings, maintain a small lookup script instead of dozens of rewrite rules. Example flow: rewrite Detail.aspx internally to redirect-old.php, have that PHP read dct/mid from $_GET, consult an array or DB and issue a header("Location: /new-slug", true, 301). This is easier to maintain than a long list of .htaccess rules.

Troubleshooting: enable mod_rewrite and AllowOverride, test with curl -I (avoids browser 301 caching), use temporary 302 while testing, clear browser cache, and use Google Search Console to request re-crawl after you’ve verified redirects. — the working Redirect for plain /Home.aspx is expected; the rules above will handle the query-string cases that were failing.

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Member Avatar for Member #120589

.htaccess on a windows server? You running Apache or IIS? If IIS, .htaccess won't work - well not without a lot of messing about. IIS should have its own way of providing a 301, but can't help with that as I know v. little about IIS.

Edited by Member #120589 because: n/a
Member Avatar for jhellein

No. The new server is Apache. The old server was IIS. That is part of the problem.

Member Avatar for Member #120589

Yeah, that's what I was referring to - the old server. How about this:

Member Avatar for jhellein

My apologies for not explaining the situation more fully.

The old server (IIS) is no longer. But the aspx links that it used still "live" in Google and I wld like to redirect those aspx links to the new (Apache) server site.

I have had limited success using a 301 redirect in .htaccess; for example:

Redirect 301 /Home.aspx

Works fine. But the example that I opened the post with:

Redirect 301 /Detail.aspx?dct=11&mid=1656

Does not work nor does any link that has a "?" after the aspx.

So I need a solution to redirect broken links that use the old aspx? nomenclature to the new pages at the site.

Member Avatar for Member #120589

Ah, I see, you need a regex (wo)man. I'm a complete numpty at regex - anybody else out there?

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