Configure a redirect 301 in .htaccess is very easy. This redirection is used when we need to change urls of our websites and not lose the positioning of these urls when redirecting them.

This redirect warns search engines that the content has been permanently redirected to another url. Then the search engines reindex the new urls and we do not lose the positioning that we had gained before.

It is important that when I talk about url I mean that redirections can be applied to both server files and pages.

I will do the practical cases in .htaccess.

Among the examples we will see practical cases such as the redirection of a URL, domain redirection and directory redirection. The functions used will be:

• .htaccess redirect 301
• .htaccess redirectmatch 301
• .htaccess redirectmatch permanent
• .htaccess RewriteRule

Difference between ‘redirect 301’ and ‘redirectmatch 301

‘redirect 301‘ is used to redirect a single url for each line of code in the .htaccess

While ‘redirectmatch 301‘ is used when we want to establish redirection rules using regular expressions (patterns), and thus all urls that meet those rules will be redirected to the new ones.

Redirecting a URL with ‘redirect 301

In this example code we want to redirect a url to another url.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Redirect 301 /url.html https://www.yourdomain.com/newurl.html

Redirect 301 urls based on regular expressions with ‘redirectmatch 301

The use of regular expressions in .htaccess is widely used due to the code saving it implies:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
#redirect all the content of a web to another domain respecting the structure of urls, let's see 2 ways to do it
RedirectMatch 301 /(.*) https://www.yourdomain.com/$1
RedirectMatch permanent /(.*) http://wwws.yourdomain.com/$1

#redirect all the content of a web to the home page of another domain, I give you 2 examples
RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ https://www.yourdomain.com
RedirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ https://www.yourdomain.com

#redirect the content of a directory to a new one respecting the url structure from the redirected directory, also applies if the new address is in another domain
RedirectMatch 301 /current-directory/(.*) https://www.yourdomain.com/new-directory/$1
RedirectMatch permanent /current-directory/(.*) https://www.yourdomain.com/new-directory/$1

Redirect 301 with ‘RewriteRule

RewriteRule does the same function as RedirectMatch only with different declaration, I give you an example:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule /current-directory/(.*) https://www.yourdomain.com/new-directory/$1 [R=301,L]

With these 3 ways of doing redirect 301 we cover most of the needs that we will usually have.