Are my 301 redirects setup correctly?? Google sees them as 404

Question

I'm between a rock in a hard place here and losing quite a bit of money. I just relaunched my web site: http://www.kgstiles.com. I was having some problems with loss of traffic. I realized that I did not have my 301 redirects set up properly. I fixed them and resubmitted my sitemap to Google. Google has since indexed most of it. I just found that the "link-juice" is not transferring properly(and therefore traffic has not come up), so I went into webmasters to find about 450, 404 errors. Upon investigation, I found that most of them were for pages that produced my desired 301 redirect in a browser. For example, http://kgstiles.com/pureplantessentials.html 301 redirects to http://kgstiles.com/pureplantessentials/ based on my .htacess file which states:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteRule ^moreinfo/(.*)$ http://www.kgstiles.com/moreinfo$1 [R=301]
    RewriteRule ^healthsolutions/(.*)$ http://www.kgstiles.com/healthsolutions$1 [R=301]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ $1/ [R=301,L]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)\.htm$ $1/ [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

But this is listed as a 404 error page by Google's indexing of my site. Am I configuring correctly? Could there be another underlying problem? I'm pretty desperate for answers here, so any help is greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

This article answers the question thoroughly and shows how to get around the problem:

http://www.deer-creek.ca/articles/search-engine-optimization/wordpress-pages-returning-404-page-not-found-headers

Answer 2

you will likely also need to add:

Options +FollowSymlinks

You can add it just above:

RewriteEngine On

And in your .htaccess file you shouldn't need to include the tags, instead this should be configured within your httpd.conf.