Rewrite http://site.com/?************* to http://site.html

Hi all,
I have been struggling with this to no avail. Should be simple but I need to redirect any page from site.com/?(with anything after it) to site.com. I made an accident rewriting from an old site to the new site and my ranking suffered dramatically since it shows so many duplicate home pages.

Redirect http://sub.site.com/(nothinghere)?(anything after here) to http://sub.site.com

So anotherwords
Redirect http://sub.site.com/?**** to http://sub.site.com

So you want to redirect anything pointing to the home page that uses a querystring, to the home page but without the querystring ?



The ? must be present in the destination URL without a QSA flag so that Apache drops the querystring when redirecting. The [R=301] flag makes it work like "Redirect permenant ..." would.

Thanks for the quiuck reply! I'm a newbie so here is something I got that seems to be working ok from this example someone else posted that I tried from another forum. Its a little different from what you posted but looks close. But I have no clue whats best or what some of this means. Or for that matter if it will affect the current links in Vbulletin. I have tested a little with the below and it seems ok though. Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks

The differences are trivial, they both essentually do the same thing.
It's a case of "you say potato I say potatoe".

In mine the code reads "if QUERY_STRING isn't empty"
In theirs it reads "if there's anything in QUERY_STRING"

In mine the pattern will tolerate a lone forward-slash
In theirs it doesn't

In mine the L (or last rule) flag is dropped because R=301 will automaticly cause the rewrite to return so L doesn't matter.
In theirs L is probably added out of habit.

You could flip a coin to decide which one you want to use unless you're using an older version of Apache where the tolerance of a single forward-slash may be needed.

Ok so it sounds like they both do basically the same thing. The forward slash sounds to be the most compatible then so I think I will go with that then. Thanks for all your input. Have a great weekend.

Certainly.