If you have long nasty URLs on your site and you wish to shorten them or make them more friendly to users or search engines — one solution can be found using Apache’s mod_alias.
In order to use this solution you will need to have rights to edit Apache’s conf files or just the conf file for your virtual host.
The basic format is:
Redirect <status> <old URL> <new URL>
Status is optional. The default value is 302.
| Status | Description | |
| 301 | Permanent | This tells the browser and search engine to permanently disregard the old URL and only pay attention to the new URL. Use this when you are permanently moving content off-domain or restructuring your on-domain page tree. |
| 302 | Temporary | Use temporary redirects when you want to clean up on-domain links. Search engines will continue to index the old URL but browsers will redirect to the new URL. For example use a 302 status to redirect team.league.com to city.team.league.com/display.php?team=123. |
| 303 | See other | This status code is useful to prevent duplicate form submissions. |
| 401 | Gone | This is telling the browser that the page is gone forever. In this case do not supply a URL to redirect to. |
Examples:
Redirect all requests to a new domain
Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/
Permanently redirect an on-domain path to a new on-domain path
Redirect 301 /old/foo /new/foo
Temporarily redirect a path off domain. (Search engines will treat this as a 301)
Redirect /foo http://www.offdomain.com/foo
Indicate that the given page is gone forever.
Redirect 401 /dead/page.html