Manual 301 redirects in OpenCart

Question

I've changed a few URLs on my OpenCart (version 1.5.6) website and then I've changed them one more time; Google started alerting me that there are dead links and now I'm trying fix things up by adding manual 301 redirects in .htaccess : I used to do this whenever I was using WordPress.

I'm more than okay to do each link manually, I actually do prefer this method.

However, whenever I add a line in .htaccess it tends to be ignored.

Below is the content of my .htaccess file:

<Files *.ini>
Order deny,allow
Deny from All
</Files>

SetEnv PHPRC /home/shopurl/
Options +FollowSymlinks

Options -Indexes

<FilesMatch "\.(tpl|ini|log)">
 Order deny,allow
 Deny from all
</FilesMatch>

# SEO URL Settings
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^shopurl.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.shopurl.com/$1 [R=301,L]


RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^sitemap.xml$ index.php?route=feed/google_sitemap [L]
RewriteRule ^googlebase.xml$ index.php?route=feed/google_base [L]
RewriteRule ^download/(.*) /index.php?route=error/not_found [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*\.(ico|gif|jpg|jpeg|png|js|css)
RewriteRule ^([^?]*) index.php?_route_=$1 [L,QSA]

<ifModule mod_headers.c>
    Header set Connection keep-alive
</ifModule>

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/x-javascript application/javascript
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
    Header append Vary User-Agent
</ifModule>

<FilesMatch "\.(js|css|jpg|png|jpeg|gif|xml|json|txt|pdf|mov|avi|otf|woff|ico|swf)$">
    RequestHeader unset Cookie
    Header unset Cookie
    Header unset Set-Cookie
    ErrorDocument 404 'Not Found'
</FilesMatch>

How can I achieve that successfully?

Answer 1

Add all your RewriteRules just after your RewriteBase / line, like this:

...
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^your-url$ /your-new-url [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^your-page$ /your-new-page [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^your-category$ /your-new-category [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^your-product$ /your-new-product [L,R=301]

RewriteRule ^sitemap.xml$ index.php?route=feed/google_sitemap [L]
...

So it rewrites:

http://www.yoursite.com/your-url
- to -
http://www.yoursite.com/your-new-url

etc...