Error with folder redirect

[pro_seo]

Happy New Year Friends!

I am trying to redirect all the content of a specific folder to the homepage.

While some URLs are redirecting in a proper way but some are encountering an error.

The content of my .HTACCESS is as follows:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On

RedirectMatch 301 ^/d/(.*)$ http://www.example.com/
RedirectMatch 301 ^/estate-agent/(.*)$ http://www.example.com/

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(sid¦action¦usg¦action¦id)=
RewriteRule $ http://www.example.com/? [R=301,L]

While URLs such as www.example.com/d/?action=displaycat&catid=118 are working properly but for some URLs such as www.example.com/d/Recreation/Games, the redirected URL becomes

http://www.example.com/?rewritten=1&action=displaycat&catname=Recreation/Games

while the pages for the /estate-agent/ folder are redirecting without any trouble

Kindly advise where I am going wrong with my redirect directives.

Thanks!

[jdMorgan]

You are mixing RedirectMatch directives from mod_alias with RewriteRule directives from mod_rewrite. The problem you're seeing is caused by the mod_rewrite code executing first and rewriting the static URL-path request to a dynamic filepath, followed by the RedirectMatch directives invoking an external redirect and thus 'exposing' the internal filepath as a URL to the client.

The best solution is to re-code your RedirectMatch directives as RewriteRules, placing all external redirects before all internal rewrites, and ending each rule with an [L] flag.

Jim