How to setup 301 redirects for specific urls in a .htaccess file

[godbar]

I'm currently tearing my hair out over this. I have around 900 urls which need specific 301 redirects, for example

old_url.php is now new-url.html

Can someone please tell me the correct format/syntax to use when inserting a 301 redirect manually into a .htaccess file on a server using cPanel?

I've spent about a week handcrafting these in a txt document after spending hours grilling the support staff at bluehost on the correct syntax but when I insert these lines of code into my .htaccess file I get server 500 errors so I've clearly got the syntax and placement of the redirects wrong. Here is how my 900 lines of code look.

Redirect 301 /user.php?op=login&enable_back= http://www.loopgalaxy.com/my-account

I've spent hours looking for forum posts that might solve this but they are a few years old and I guess things have changed. My other concern now is that even if I find some syntax that works it's not going to be easy to
edit my code to what it needs to be. I can't face manually editing all 900 of these again

Any advice is greatly appreciated.:p

 

[pwhjenny]

Hello,

You can use following code to redirect URL using .htaccess file .

To redirect certain pages

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.yourdomain.com/newpage.html
 Redirect 301 /oldpage2.html http://www.yourdomain.com/newpage2.html

To redirect entire website

Redirect 301 / http://www.new-site.com/

 

[godbar]

Hi pwhjenny,

Yes that first is the exact code I used but when I insert that into my .htaccess file and try to view the site I get a 500 internal server error.

I should mention that my site is a wordpress site in the root of my domain. The existing .htaccess file contains this:

# 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

I have tried pasting the redirect codes above this wordpress code but again it gives me the server error.

 

[godbar]

After struggling with this all day I luckily stumbled on a wordpress plugin that did the trick by somehow creating a .htaccess.swp file that contaied all my redirects which I imported from my txt document using the plugin.

The plugin is called Redirection. I gave them a little donation as it saved me hours of grief with Bluehost who were unable to advise in any way. Not sure if this is the ideal solution or if I'll be able to figure out the correct way of doing this so if anyone has any ideas on the proper method I'd still love to know.

I guess I can scrap the redirects after about 8 weeks to give the search cache time to update to the new redirected urls? Does anyone have advice on that?

Cheers