htaccess redirect not working for long url

Question

How do I redirect the following long link:

http://www.vbpmonitor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=24&utm_source=MagnetMail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=asmith@panaceainc.com&utm_content=EVVWP040716&utm_campaign=White%20Paper%3A%20Optimizing%20VBM%20Quality%20Tiering%20for%20Physicians

to

http://www.vbpmonitor.com/optimizing-vbm-quality-tiering-for-physicians

Redirect 301 /index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=24&utm_source=MagnetMail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=asmith@panaceainc.com&utm_content=EVVWP040716&utm_campaign=White%20Paper%3A%20Optimizing%20VBM%20Quality%20Tiering%20for%20Physicians http://www.vbpmonitor.com/optimizing-vbm-quality-tiering-for-physicians

Answer 1

As said above in the comments I suspect that you have a glitch in your logic here and that in reality you want to redirection to work the other way 'round. Redirecting from the long to the search engine friendly URL simply does not make any sense. So:

Using a Redirect rule you could try that instead:

Redirect 301 /optimizing-vbm-quality-tiering-for-physicians /index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=24&utm_source=MagnetMail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=asmith@panaceainc.com&utm_content=EVVWP040716&utm_campaign=White%20Paper%3A%20Optimizing%20VBM%20Quality%20Tiering%20for%20Physicians

This will redirect an incoming request to the short URL to the actually existing long URL. That is the usual scenario.

If however you really want to redirect that short URL to the long version, then you cannot do that with a Redirect rule. This might for example be the case if you accidentally sent out that long URL and have a working redirection setup for the short version. Unfortunately you do not explain anything about that in your question or comments, so I can only guess here.

You'd have to use the more flexible rewriting module and use a combination of RewriteCond and RewriteRule. That allows to "cut out" specific patterns of request URLs and to "redesign" how the request should look like after the rewriting.

This would be a simple example that applies two conditions to rewriting the request for file index.php to the long URL:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} view=article 
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} id=24
RewriteRule ^/?index\.php$ /optimizing-vbm-quality-tiering-for-physicians [L,R=301]

Note: this version should work both in the http servers host configuration and also in those .htaccess style files. Where you always should prefer the first option if you have access.

As said above, I can only guess here with the sparse information you provided. I picked two out of many request arguments, since those appear to be the ones best suited as distinct identifiers. But you may have to tweak things. Note that per default RewriteConds are combined by a logical AND, so they both have to resolve to something truish.

For more precise details about this stuff I would like to point you to the official documentation of those modules again. The documentation is extremely precise, well written and comes with good examples. I would always prefer the information there to snippets you find somewhere in the internet or partial answers to questions...

1. http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_alias.html#redirect
2. http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html