Rewrite Old dynamic URL to new Dynamic URL

Question

My website was using the below URL format

localhost/loc-New-Delhi-India (loc - was common in all URLs and the text after it used to change)

Now, I have changed it to

localhost/New-Delhi-India/location (Removed the loc and placed it at the end of URL as 'location'). For this, I'm using the below rewrite rule

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/(location)?$ city-detail.php?cityurl=$1

cityurl grabs the string after 'localhost' and searches the db.

Now since the website is heavily indexed by Google and shared a lot on social media, I want to redirect those urls to the new URLs. I tried the below code, but this just doesn't work.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule "loc-(.*)" "^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/(location)?$ city-detail.php?cityurl=$1" [R]

The new URLs are created successfully, but the old one's fail to redirect to the new one. I'm sure something's wrong but cannot find it. I researched the old questions but they are a bit different. Here, I'm not including any subdirectory after localhost and adding a directory 'localhost' after the city name.

Any help will be appreciated a lott :)

Answer 1

The following would probably work:

RewriteRule loc-(.*) $1/location [R=301,QSA]

RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/(location)?$ city-detail.php?cityurl=$1

The first rule will trigger a 301 redirect which will also tell any search engines that your resource has been permanently moved and that would probably make them change their indexes to reflect this. Once you've redirected the 2nd rule should trigger as normal.