Redirect Single Page for Search Engine Query

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So if anyone reading this is an htaccess expert and can give a me a little help I’d appreciate it. I’m looking to trap for queries for a specific term from a search engine for a specific page and redirect them elsewhere. For example:

if the query was

http://www.google.com/search?q=foo*

and it went to

http://www.wolf-howl.com/foo/

I’d like to redirect to

http://example.com/foo/

for people who come to the page any other way I’d still like to show them

http://www.wolf-howl.com/foo/

11 Responses to “Redirect Single Page for Search Engine Query”

1. Jan Says:
   September 10th, 2006 at 6:03 pm

   RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} google.com [NC]
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} q=foo [NC]
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/foo/$
   RewriteRule ^/foo/$ http://example.org/foo/ [R,L]

   If the referer contains “google.com”
   and the referer contains “q=foo”
   and the request was for exactly “/foo/”
   then redirect the user to “http://example.org/foo/”.

   Untested and of course has to be tuned to work with different strings for foo. RewriteCond backreferences can be a good friend in this case.

2. Jonathan Says:
   September 10th, 2006 at 6:24 pm

   What would be the point of doing a redirect depending on where they are coming from though? Woudln’t you rather have everyone go to the same page no matter how they got there?

3. Michael Gray Says:
   September 10th, 2006 at 6:33 pm
   That worked thanks Jan.

   Johnathan, people coming from a SE are looking for a commercial result, others aren’t.

4. garrett Says:
   September 10th, 2006 at 6:55 pm

   you should send all that chicken noodle soup traffic to a ringtones page

5. Michael Gray Says:
   September 10th, 2006 at 8:00 pm
   update you may need to change this line

   RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} q=foo [NC]

   to this

   RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^q=foo^ [NC]

   to catch it no matter what order the parameters are in

6. Mike Says:
   September 11th, 2006 at 5:07 am

   Would it make sense to check for q=foo before google.com, instead of putting every request from Google through to the second check?

7. Jan Says:
   September 11th, 2006 at 5:50 am

   > RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^q=foo^ [NC]

   Hmm I don’t get this change. I am definitely no htaccess expert, so i’m intrigued to try to understand this.

   Doesn’t this tell mod_rewrite only to match if “q=foo” is found between the beginning and the beginning of the HTTP_REFERER string?

8. Ken Savage Says:
   September 11th, 2006 at 12:06 pm

   What about all the other SE’s?

9. Michael Gray Says:
   September 11th, 2006 at 12:24 pm
   The page doesn’t rank in the other SE’s because they do things the right way for this query instead of taking advantage of silly users habits to show more adverts
10. Mike Says:
    September 11th, 2006 at 1:19 pm

    I was also wondering if “^q=foo^” works, or if you meant “*q=foo*”? Since ^ marks the start of the string and * would be a wildcard.

    If you need to do any more fine tuning, the mod_rewrite cheat-sheet can come in handy for the basics:

    http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/mod_rewrite_cheat_sheet.png

11. Jan Says:
    September 17th, 2006 at 10:21 am

    Michael?