I have a category "A" that is for some reason, redirecting to category "B". Category "B" was also disabled in the zenCart admin months ago.

I have specifically set up my .htaccess to redirect category "B" to category "C" - which isn't working. All of the other redirects in my .htaccess are working.

Has anyone run into this situation before - where a category suddenly redirects to another? I need to get my category "A" up and running again, is it's responsible for about 15% of my sales.

Let's see your code...

BOF SSU

Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^shop/CategoryB$ http://www.mysite.com/CategoryC [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^shop/CategoryB/CategoryB-(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/CategoryC/CategoryC-$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteRule ^shop/(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^shop$ http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L]

RewriteBase /

Deny access from .htaccess

RewriteRule ^.htaccess$ - [F]

RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*) index.php?/$1 [E=VAR1:$1,QSA]

EOF SSU

Note that some of the rules are from re-directing the links from the old location of the store (mydomain.com/shop) to the new location (mydomain.com).

As you can see, CategoryA isn't even mentioned in the .htaccess.

Forgot to mention that I'm running SSU.

After poking around the .htaccess (and my webhost breaking the site by modifying the .htaccess for me) I figured it had to be something to do with SSU. I had already tried resetting the category cache so I went ahead ran the "check and fix cache (run this once...)" and everything seems to be working again.

Case closed.

Rule order optimised, added escaping in patterns, added non-www to www canonicalisation, and rewrite re-coded for better server efficiency:

# SSU SetUp
Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
RewriteEngine On

# Deny access to .htaccess
RewriteRule ^\.htaccess$ - [F]

# The "/" is the default value so remove the following line
# RewriteBase /

# Custom Redirects
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.example.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^shop/CategoryB$ http://www.example.com/CategoryC [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^shop/CategoryB/CategoryB-(.*)$ http://www.example.com/CategoryC/CategoryC-$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^shop(/index\.html)?$ http://www.example.com/shop/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^shop/(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

# Canonical Redirect to www.example.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.example\.com)?$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

# SSU Rewrite
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(jpe?g|gif|png|css|js|zip)$
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*) index.php?/$1 [E=VAR1:$1,QSA]

Every change is important, right down to the last slash and dot.

g1smd:

Rule order optimised, added escaping in patterns, added non-www to www canonicalisation, and rewrite re-coded for better server efficiency:

SSU SetUp

Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
RewriteEngine On

Deny access to .htaccess

RewriteRule ^.htaccess$ - [F]

The "/" is the default value so remove the following line

RewriteBase /

Custom Redirects

RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.example.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^shop/CategoryB$ http://www.example.com/CategoryC [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^shop/CategoryB/CategoryB-(.)$ http://www.example.com/CategoryC/CategoryC-$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^shop(/index.html)?$ http://www.example.com/shop/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^shop/(.)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Canonical Redirect to www.example.com

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www.example.com)?$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

SSU Rewrite

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.(jpe?g|gif|png|css|js|zip)$
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*) index.php?/$1 [E=VAR1:$1,QSA]

> 
> Every change is important, right down to the last slash and dot.
Wow :clap:

So, I should remove the: "RewriteBase"?

On the following line, should it not re-direct to the mainsite instead of the /shop/ folder, since I moved the store out of that directory to the main folder?

If this .htaccess file is placed in the root folder of your domain, it will redirect requests for files in the /shop/ folder to the same remainder path and filename (apart for the explicit coded exceptions), but in the root of the domain. Nothing in the code I supplied redirects to the /shop/ folder.

To be clear, in a RewriteRule the Regular Expression pattern (on the left) is tested for a match with the requested URL specified in the literal GET /shop/somefile HTTP/1.1 request coming from the browser.

The literal target (on the right) should be a full protocol+domain+path if the rule is a redirect. In that case the [R=301,L] flags should be added. If the literal target is without protocol and without domain and used only with the [L] flag then the result is an internal rewrite of the incoming URL request to a non-default internal filepath inside the server.