Remove index.php and add 301 redirects in .htaccess (ExpressionEngine)

Question

A client has an expressionengine site and wants the 'index.php' removed. Doing this alone will put a dent in his sites SEO ranking since it will change all URLs. So, we want to retain link equity and social network share counts by adding a 301 to all pages.

I know how to remove the index.php and I know how to redirect (I think), but when I use them both, the server throws a redirect loop. My logic is warped. What am I missing here?

Here is what I'm working with:

# Redirect attempt
Redirect 301 /index.php/feature/article/ http://domain.com/feature/article/

# EE index.php rewrite
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|js|path\.php|press_releases|rear|robots\.txt|text\.html|themes) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

Jon Lin · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-24 03:54:16Z

2

You only want to redirect if the actual request is for an /index.php/ URL. Change your Redirect directive to this:

# Redirect attempt
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php
RewriteRule ^/?index.php/feature/article/(.*)$ http://domain.com/feature/article/$1 [R=301,L]

This condition matches against the actual request that the server got and not the URI (which can get rewritten by the second rule).

edited Jul 24, 2012 at 3:54

answered Jul 24, 2012 at 3:44

Jon Lin

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2 Comments

Ryan Dunlap Over a year ago

Makes complete sense. Thanks a ton. What if I had a variable on the end. Something like '/feature/article/{variable_article_name}/' How would I "move" the {variable_article_name} from the request to the rewrite?

Ryan Dunlap Over a year ago

Now we're talkin! Works great. Thanks for the insight.

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