Redirecting 404 error with htaccess via 301 for SEO etc

Question

I couldn t find a straight answer to my question and need to know it from the real experts   I had a website which urls were generated by Joomla  I believe that tons of urls are around in the search engines and I really don t know which of them all  A 302 redirect would be an option  but I can t say which urls need to be redirected   The only thing I know that all the urls were generated by a sef404 script  it s a SEO script for Joomla   My question  how can I make sure that all the orphan urls on google and other search engines are delivered correctly with a  htaccess file   How do I 301 redirect all 404 pages to the homepage  root document   At the moment I use a custom 404 html error file  but there are too many files and will give a rollercoaster of custom 404 error pages

User · Answer

I came up with the solution and posted it on my blog

http://web.archive.org/web/20130310123646/http://onlinemarketingexperts.com.au/2013/01/how-to-permanently-redirect-301-all-404-missing-pages-in-htaccess/

here is the htaccess code also

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule . / [L,R=301]

but I posted other solutions on my blog too, it depends what you need really

User · Answer

You will need to know something about the URLs  like do they have a specific directory or some query string element because you have to match for something  Otherwise you will have to redirect on the 404  If this is what is required then do something like this in your  htaccess   ErrorDocument 404  index php   An error page redirect must be relative to root so you cannot use www mydomain com   If you have a pattern to match too then use 301 instead of 302 because 301 is permanent and 302 is temporary  A 301 will get the old URLs removed from the search engines and the 302 will not   Mod Rewrite Reference  http   httpd apache org docs 1 3 mod mod rewrite html

[.htaccess] Redirecting 404 error with .htaccess via 301 for SEO etc

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