htaccess redirect from specific urls of my site to the homepage

Question

I know, such a question has been asked and answered multiple times in the past before. However, as I tried out all the solutions I found online, it didn't solve my problem. The issue is that I have a wordpress site, which, when someone googles the address, google gives some results of pages are empty. The site in question is garrymbsmith.com and the unwanted results are for example http://www.garrymbsmith.com/?nava=contact http://www.garrymbsmith.com/?nava=home-2

These results unfortunately don't give a 404 error page as it would be easy then to just modify the 404.php file and redirect people straight to the home page. They seem like normal pages but they are not. They are empty and the main navigation bar on top also doesn't help people go to the home page (the site is a single page website and the menu links are actually targeting anchor links within the same home page).

As I said, editing the 404.php didn't help as they are not such kind of pages. I searched super thorougly within the admin area for unwanted pages, posts, tags, categories, galleries etc... but without any luck... I can't find anything that justifies the existence of these links.

So, I hope that someone can help me with this as it is driving me crazy. I believe that with htaccess I could force these 3 links to redirect to the home page... Help please!!! Many thanks in advance

Zisis

Answer 1

If you're going to have plenty of URLs to be handled later on, you can use Simple 301 Redirects (or similar) plugin available on WP Repo.

Here is the link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-301-redirects/

The plugin offers options on WP dashboard instead of playing with htaccess file.

I'm finding it very helpful with Woocommerce site where, sometimes I have to deal with many URLs.

Answer 2

You need to Rewrite and redirect URLs with query parameters

For example:

This URL: garrymbsmith.com/?nava=contact

To destination URL: www.garrymbsmith.com

.htaccess syntax:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} nava=contact
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /? [L,R=301]

For detailed reference of different htaccess rules/scenarios you may refer to this awesome resource: https://gist.github.com/ScottPhillips/1721489

Update Added After Comment

Please try this htaccess I took your htaccess code and modified it, let me know if it works?

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c> 
 RewriteEngine On 
 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} nava=contact
 RewriteRule .*$ /? [L,R=301]
 RewriteBase / 
 RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L] 
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f 
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d 
 RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>