Deleted product redirects

.htaccess rules are very powerful/flexible and so can be daunting at first.
When you delete a product, external links to that product will fail as not found “404”. This is something you want to avoid as you lose those long-established inward links.
To prevent that, and to automatically inform and update the requesting server links requires a 301 code to be returned and a redirect to the new url you wish be used as a the permanent replacement.

Example “Redirect”

The old/obsolete product url:
www.mysite.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1_5963&products_id=8263

The new product url:
www.mysite.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1_5963&products_id=9015

In .htaccess, add:

Redirect 301 www.mysite.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1_5963&products_id=9015 www.mysite.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1_5963&products_id=8263

Note you are trapping the entire url, returning a 301 to the requesting server and redirecting to another complete url.

However, if there are already “RewriteRule” commands in the same file, these will be processed first, which can be very confusing if they match your url first so you think your redirect is not working.
In this case you should use a RewriteRule instead of a Redirect to prevent confusion.

Example “Rewrite”

The old/obsolete product url is just the stub:
www.mysite.com/index.php
and the rest is the query string: main_page=product_info&cPath=1_5963&products_id=8263

So to redirect this with a RewriteRule requires a RewriteCond to match the query string:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^.*products_id=8263$
RewriteRule ^index.php$ /index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=97&products_id=9015 [R=301,L]

In this example, note the following about RewriteCond:
^ - start of the string to match
.* - is any number of any characters. You could use more of the query string, but using this means it captures urls with different or missing cPaths.
products_id=8263 - is the part you want to match
$ - the end of the string, meaning that products_id=8263 is at the end of the string.

In the RewriteRule,
^ - start of the url to match. Note the url is index.php, nothing else.
\. – the backslash is just escaping the decimal point
$ - the end of the url
/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=97&products_id=9015 - the destination on the same server
[R=301,L] – 301 is the code to return to the server, L means it’s the last rule/don’t process any more rules for the RewriteCond above it.