mod_rewrite infinite loop with SEO friendly URLs

Question

I'm tidying up my urls to make them SEO friendly, but I have run into the issue of getting into an infinite loop and although I have read various other articles, I can't seem to find an answer to my question.

Example:

• Current URL : www.example.co.uk/aboutus.php
• Required SEO friendly URL: www.example.co.uk/about-us

Note: Since the URLS are slightly different I can't just drop off the .php

I can get the /about-us link to correctly rewrite to show the /about.php content using:

RewriteRule ^about-us /aboutus.php [NC,L]

But, what I also need to achieve is that the old url which is indexed in Google is redirected to the new url to preserve page rank:

RewriteRule ^aboutus.php /about-us [NC,L,R=301]

But these two rules get stuck in a loop, how can I resolve this please?

Thanks

Answer 1

need to check an incoming request

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \s\/aboutus\.php\s
RewriteRule . /about-us [NC,L,R=301]