Sitecore SXA wild card redirect from language code url to non language code url

Hi Folks

This will be a quick post as i wanted to quickly share this scenario and i am sure it will be helpful for many of you as it includes SEO inputs and how we had to change few things to support it

 

Scenario

Recently we changed the implementation of our sitemap generator as it was not respecting the "language embedding" flag, which is a known issue mentioned here , so we had to overwrite it and make our own to make it work, but all good so far so now our site map did not have any URLs with language code appended to it.

But our SEO team came up with the analysis that there are users still going to 404 page because of they are hitting URL with the language code, Although we had that flag to true in Sitecore.config settings

So, Logically all pages should be accessible only without language code in the URL

Now, we knew that if we hit pages with language code they are going to 404, but our SEO team insisted that it should go to the actual pages with 301 redirect, and it should happen site wide because of either old URL book marked or search engines might have references of it and if someone is coming from there.

Solution

Well, SXA redirect module is there from the inception but till now i only did one to one mapping of OLD to NEW url, but in this case we wanted to identify the language code (we only had one language i,e "en") in the incoming url and wanted to redirect users to non language specific URLs and that is where i started playing around with wild card pattern in the SXA redirect module.

Question i had was i will be able to write the pattern for incoming URL but how can i redirect user to pages without the language code? that is where TOKEN came into picture 

SXA redirect module provides tokens like $1, $2 and so on which will be replaced by corresponding strings from the input regex

so now it was time to test things my left side regex was like below (or refer the screenshot on the top to see how mapping was done to achieve this)

^/en(/.*)$

and gave its corresponding URL on right hand side as "/$1"

that means, redirect all incoming request with language code to the corresponding page without the language code

I tested and it worked like a charm !!! and now we did not have any users landing to error page if they hit pages with language code in the URL.

I hope this will help someone looking for something like this.