Shortten URL's with htaccess that works with Google indexing - html

Question

Ok, let's explain first what I have in the server and in the htaccess file:
In the server I have the following files:
www.mydomain.com/provincias/madrid/town1.html
www.mydomain.com/provincias/madrid/town2.html
www.mydomain.com/provincias/madrid/town3.html
...
www.mydomain.com/provincias/barcelona/town1.html
www.mydomain.com/provincias/barcelona/town2.html
...
as you see, the folder 'provincias' is repeated in all urls, is necessary for get ordered the internal files but not for navigate and for users, for this reason I have added the following rule in the htaccess file that works fine:
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z]+)/([a-zA-Z]+)\.html$ provincias/$1/$2\.html [L,NC]
so with this rule you can access, for example, the next url: www.mydomain.com/provincias/barcelona/town2.html with this other url that users see in the address bar of their browsers: www.mydomain.com/barcelona/town2.html because internally the htaccess redirect it to the real url with 'provincias'.
But I have a problem, I have seen that Google has indexed the technical and real url, the first one, with 'provincias' folder, and if you click on it people navigate watching that url in their address bar. How can I redirect the people and google traffic from www.mydomain.com/provincias/barcelona/town2.html to www.mydomain.com/barcelona/town2.html taking into consideration that internally the url without 'provincias' doesn't exist?

Answer 1

Try this rule in your .htaccess
#redirect real url to new one
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} [A-Z]{3,}\ /+provincias/([^&\ ]+)/([^&\ ]+)\.html
RewriteRule ^ /%1/%2.html? [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z]+)/([a-zA-Z]+)\.html$ provincias/$1/$2\.html [L,NC]