301 Redirects Appends ?p=original/url/path - how can I remove?

Question

Whether I'm using the Reroute plugin or plugging it in .htaccess, changing the path elsewhere appends the query in the end. How can I remove?

Redirect 301 /blog/category /blog/archive

Is the line I have in my .htaccess

So if I go to:

http://domain.com/blog/category/category-name

it takes me to:

http://domain.com/blog/archive/category-name?p=blog/category/category-name

What's going on here?

Answer 1

The issue here is that your Redirect directive is conflicting with Craft’s index.php-hiding RewriteRule directive. (Redirect is a mod_alias directive and RewriteRule is a mod_rewrite directive. They’re two separate modules that can be used for the same thing, but lead to unexpected consequences when used together.)

To fix this, use a RewriteRule directive for your own custom redirects as well, rather than Redirect.

RewriteRule ^blog/category(/.*)?$ /blog/archive$1 [R=301,L]

Make sure that you place that before Craft’s redirect.

Answer 2

One way you can avoid this is by making a small change to the htaccess rules for removing index.php from Craft URLs. You can remove the query string from RewriteRule (.+) index.php?p=$1 [QSA,L] and replace it with /$1

So the full set of rules to remove index.php would be

# Send would-be 404 requests to Craft
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(favicon\.ico|apple-touch-icon.*\.png)$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.+) index.php/$1 [QSA,L]

This seems to work fine in my test and prevents the query string from being appended to the URL when using Redirect 301 in htaccess.

Answer 3

What happens if you add a ? to the rule:

RewriteRule ^blog/category?$ /blog/archive [R=301,L,NE]

Answer 4

If you need to remove these from search results, you may find this helpful: Remove Query Strings from URLs