Apache redirect strange behavior

Question

I have two websites, an old one and a new one. I have set up redirects in the old site to point to pages on the new site. However, I'm seeing some strange behavior on some of the redirects.

E.g. I have the following redirect in the .htaccess on the old site:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On

    Redirect 301 /car-finance/car-loan-comparison http://www.newsite.com/car-finance/car-finance-comparison
 </IfModule>

When I go to the old site to /car-finance/car-loan-comparison I'm being redirect to the new site on the path /car-finance/car-loan-comparison resulting in a 404.

For some reason the old path is applied to the domain in the redirect instead of the redirected path.

This is what I have in the .htaccess of my newsite:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On

    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^newsite\.com$ [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newsite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>

Any ideas much appreciated,

Answer 1

Use the rewrite logging option to get some detailed output of what it is doing; you'll be able to see where the problem is, and mostly likely exactly why it is happening:

Add these to your rewrite config:

RewriteLog "/tmp/rewrite.log"
RewriteLogLevel 9

Don't forget to disable it afterwards or you'll chew up your disk space and reduce performance.