Hi y'all!

I just moved one of our corporate sites from an ASP.Net portal (DotNetNuke) to a php solution due to a variety of reasons, one of which is the easy URL Rewriting and the other being performance (DotNetNuke performs HORRIBLY due to its poor design requiring several hundred separate back end queries per page). Because of the way DotNetNuke works, there are multiple URL formats for each request, which while making things flexible, also (presumably) results in duplicate content penalties in various search engines. Oh that's right - I forgot while dealing with the reimplementation that the single biggest reason for dumping DNN was the duplicate content issue!

Anyway, I've worked with mod_rewrite quite a bit where enforcing canonical domains and redirecting requests to a php handler are concerned - but now I want to send a 301 Permanent Redirect response to requests for old pages to force them to drop out of search engines (right now we are returning 404 Page Not Found responses - I'd like to use 410 which is more accurate but I don't know how well googlebot, slurp, msnbot, etc. recognize the "correct" 410 removed header).

The deal is this: we are getting incoming requests from the bots in one of two formats:

First type (DNN default)

[domain]/Default.aspx?tabid=foo

And there may be additional arguments such as:

[domain]/Default.aspx?tabid=foo&argument=bar

second DNN query type

[domain]/foo/Default.aspx

And there may be additional arguments such as:

[domain]/foo/Default.aspx&argument=bar

What I would like to do is set up rules to redirect everything with a 301 header to / so I set up a rule like this:

#RewriteRule ^Default.aspx / [R=301,L]

which does not take the query into account, so a request for, say:

[domain]/Default.aspx?tabid=foo

redirects to:

[domain]/?tabid=foo


My question is this: How do I strip the query out and replace it with nothing? I've read the apache docs on mod_rewrite and all they say is that you can use QUERY_STRING to strip the query and any arguments but there is NO mention of how to use it, nor is there any example. There is plenty of example of passing the queries on to an http handler (which I've done in php sites) but this is a totally different implementation from what I can see.

Does anyone have any pointers to this? Any good documentation or howtos out there?

This should pretty much do what you expect

Ah, so I was mis-using the query_string directive when I tried it - thanks for the tip, I will try it on Wednesday!

Thanks zeitounator ! It wasn't quite what I wanted but pointed me in exactly the right direction!