Redirect on specific 404 pages to product category

[jane_eyre]

I have this structure for cars https://example.com/2015-ford-focus-12345
So it is domain / year-make-model-id

I want to be able to redirect the user if they land on the page https://example.com/2015-ford-focus-12345 and the car no longer exists (404 error) to be redirected to https://example.com/inventory/?make=ford

I am trying to make it happen on nginx server. Please help, thank you!

I am familiar with .htaccess and apache but not nginx.

[lammert]

If you plan to have multiple URLs to redirect, you may opt for a static redirect map. Create a configuration map.conf with the following contents:

map $request_uri $redirect_uri {
 /2015-brand1-model1-n1 /inventory/?make=brand1
 /2017-brand1-model2-n2 /inventory/?make=brand1
 /2013-brand2-model3-n3 /inventory/?make=brand2
 [...more fixed URL redirects...]
}

and add in your server configuration an include statement for the map file and a statement to execute the redirect:

include map.conf;
server {
 [...your current server code...]
 if ( $redirect_uri ) {
 return 301 $redirect_uri;
 }
}

[lucy24]

What you’re looking for is the nginx equivalent of a -f check: take this action if the requested file doesn’t exist.

But wait!

#1 No matter what your server type, this is a fairly server-intensive approach, since it then has to check twice on the same request. It would be a lot tidier if you could do the checking yourself--which is probably feasible, since you must have taken some action to delete the pages, so you know which ones they are.

#2 Be cautious about handling any type of 404 with a redirect. What you might think about doing instead is returning a 410, and spend some time developing a really useful 410 page.