.htaccess - Heal malformed url

Question

I need a solution. For some reason in the past seems that I generate some "bad" links for bots only.

Resume: There is a fake "page" parameter when malformed url is present. When there are 2 "page" parameters then the first one is fake, must be removed.

1. X is random
2. Remove the parameter page only when "?/?page" is detected

Good: search?pagepage=496

Bad: search?/?page=X

Good: https://example.com/search?page=496

Good: https://example.com/search?page=496&orderBy=oldest

Bad: https://example.com/search?/?page=X&page=496&orderBy=oldest

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)&?^XXX[^&]+&?(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule...

Thank you guys!

UPDATE

At final, I found a solution by myself:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)&?^/\?page=[^&]+&?(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^/?(.*)$ /search$1?%1%2 [R=301,L]

Answer 1

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^/\?page=.+&(page=.*)
RewriteRule ^(search)$ $1?%1 [R=301]

This will do the rewrite for all your URLs that have the extra page parameter you want to keep.

To make the last part optional, we would have to wrap &(page=.*) into another set of braces, and add a ? as quantifier - (&(page=.*))?. Then the back reference would need to be changed from %1 to %2 (because we only need that inner part, we don't want the &) - but then for your URL without any real page parameter to keep, there would be no match in this place, and therefor the %2 would not be substituted with anything, but added to the URL literally.

So better to leave the above as-is, and simply add

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^/\?page=.+
RewriteRule ^(search)$ $1 [QSD,R=301]

below those two existing lines. The pattern does not need to be any more specific (because the URLs that have a genuine page parameter at the end, have already been handled by those previous two lines.) And the QSD makes it simply drop the existing query string, so that https://example.com/search?/?page=20 results in https://example.com/search (which I assume is what you wanted here, because there is no actual page parameter to keep, correct?)