Redirect URLS with disallowed key characters

Question

I have a site that was converted to EE from a different blog platform, and I'm getting a bunch of crawl errors from previously indexed urls that now lead to a "disallowed key characters" error.

The urls that are causing the errors follow one of three patterns:

http://www.example.com/general/404/?404%3Bhttp://old.example.com:80/old-blog/random/segments

or

http://www.example.com/blog/?404%3Bhttp://old.example.com:80/old-blog/random/segments

or

http://www.example.com/blog/Default.aspx?404;http://old.example.com:80/old-blog/random/segments

In these urls, /general/404 is the path to my site's 404 page, and /blog/ is the path to the blog index page.

I was able to redirect the urls from the third example using this code:

RewriteRule ^blog/Default.aspx?/?$ http://www.example.com/general/404/? [L,R=301]

Is there a way I can intercept the other URLS with htaccess before they hit EE and redirect them to my 404 page? I'm not sure how to target them specifically since there is nothing before the ? in the query string url segment.

Answer 1

I was able to target the remaining urls using this code:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^404(%3B|;) [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://www.example.com/general/404/? [L,R=301]