Redirect with query stings

Question

I have a very annoying redirect I cannot figure out.

I have many hundreds of page like the below:

example.com/directory/in.php?url_id=28930

I want to redirect all e.g. /directory/in.php?url_id=28930

The redirects will all go to the homepage.

What redirect rule could you suggest?

I have already attempted many redirect rules but all fail for some reason.

Answer 1

To check for specific query strings you need to use mod_rewrite and a RewriteCond directive that checks against the QUERY_STRING server variable. (The RewriteRule pattern only matches against the URL-path, which notably excludes the query string.)

For example, to redirect the specific URL /directory/in.php?url_id=28930 in the root .htaccess file, you would do something like the following:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^url_id=28930$
RewriteRule ^directory/in\.php$ / [QSD,R=302,L]

The QSD flag (Query String Discard - Apache 2.4+ only) removes the query string from the redirected URL. If you are on Apache 2.2 then you will need to append a ? to the end of the substitution string instead, ie. /?, in order to effectively remove the query string from the redirected URL. Otherwise, by default, the query string from the request is passed through to the target URL (ie. susbstitution argument).

Note also, this is a temporary 302 redirect. If this is intended to be permanent then change the 302 to 301 only when you are sure it's working OK (to avoid any caching issues).

To make this more general and redirect any URL that contains a numeric url_id parameter value, then change the RewriteCond directive to something like:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^url_id=\d+$

Aside: From an SEO point of view, mass redirects like this to the homepage are likely to be seen as soft-404s by Google and other search engines.