The scenario
I have a menu builder (Title, Link...) in PHP/MySQL, which I want to be able to configure the friendly SEO rule in the .htaccess
The issues
Here is a typical rewrite rule at the moment:
RewriteRule ^computer/other-components/?(.*)$ index.php?CategoryID=9&SubCategoryID=2 [NC,L]
I could write all these manually in the .htaccess but there are a couple of issues:
I would have to manually do this each time I want to add/make changes to the page structure
It's really long.
I've read that writing directly to the .htaccess is a no-no for security, so what would be best to implement something like this? Wordpress and similar CMSs do similar, so what is recommended here?
Related
I've looked around and my web knowledge is basic. I'm trying to make a dynamic URL link to another-- that is, where one part of the URL can be different.
In this case, I'm trying to make (With my URL scrubbed to some generic one as not to break any rules, here):
https://theurl.com/news/fullnews.php?fn_id=33
TO
https://www.theurl.com/index.php?fn_mode=fullnews&fn_id=33
Where the 33 is a number that can be different based on the article linked.
Thanks any help that can be provided! I've tried editing some similar scripts but seem to not know quite what I'm doing.
This probably is what you are looking for:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^fn_id=(\d+)$
RewriteRule ^/?news/fullnews\.php$ /index.php?fn_mode=fullnews&fn_id=%1 [END]
You need to enable the interpretation of distributed configuration files (".htaccess") for this and obviously the rewriting module needs to be loaded and enabled in the http server.
Much more elegant and preferred for SEO reasons however would be to use a URL like that:
https://example.com/fullnews/33 or https://example.com/news/33
Which could be achieved by those rewriting rules:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/?fullnews/(\d+)$ /index.php?fn_mode=fullnews&fn_id=$1 [END]
I had to redesign a site last week. The problem is that last urls weren't seo friendly so, in order to avoid Google penalizing my site because too many 404 errors, I have to create a lot of Rewrite Rules because all the content had awful URL's ( and that content had a good position on SERP's).
For example:
RewriteRule ^documents/documents_for_subject/22-ecuaciones-exponenciales-y-logaritmicas http://%{HTTP_HOST}/1o-bachillerato/matematicas-cc.ss/aritmetica-y-algebra/ecuaciones-exponenciales-y-logaritmicas [R=301,L]
Is this a problem on my performance? Is there another solution to my situation?
Thanks
They are in the same domain.
Then an internal redirect is much better. A header redirect sends the new URL to the browser and causes it to make a new request; an internal one is handled, as the name says, internally.
This should work:
RewriteRule ^documents/documents_for_subject/22-ecuaciones-exponenciales-y-logaritmicas /1o-bachillerato/matematicas-cc.ss/aritmetica-y-algebra/ecuaciones-exponenciales-y-logaritmicas [L]
Any performance issues are going to be negligible with this - except maybe if you have many thousands or tens of thousands of individual rules, those may slow down Apache. In that case, if you have access to the central server configuration, put the rules there instead of a .htaccess file, because instructions in the server config get stored in memory and are faster.
A. Yes using 301 is the right way to notify search bots about changed URLs and eventually your old URL's will be removed from search results.
B. You don't need to use %{HTTP_HOST} in your rewrite rule just use it like this:
RewriteRule ^documents/documents_for_subject/22-ecuaciones-exponenciales-y-logaritmicas http://%{HTTP_HOST}/1o-bachillerato/matematicas-cc.ss/aritmetica-y-algebra/ecuaciones-exponenciales-y-logaritmicas [R=301,L]
C. If you have lots of RewriteRules like above I recommend using RewriteMap or else use some scripting support (like PHP) to redirect from old to new URL with 301.
I have a site that was hosted by someone else all the web pages were .html files. I am now hosting the site and have changed it to a wordpress site. The domain has not changed but obviously all the pages have. What is the best way to redirect all the .html pages to the main url?
301 Redirect in an .htaccess does not require the mod_rewrite library. It's a much simpler way to redirect, but it doesn't have the flexibility and power you get using the Rewrite rules. If you have a 1-1 mapping with explicit urls you can use the Redirect:
Redirect 301 /path/file.html http://new.site.com/newpath.php
If you're trying to do wild card matching of a number of similar patterns using regular expressions you'll need to use Rewrite.
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ http://new.site.com/$1.php [R=301,NC,L]
Here's a pretty good overview of the 2 methods: http://www.ksl-consulting.co.uk/301-redirect-examples.html
There is also RedirectMatch that also does wild card matching of similar patterns using regular expressions. The choice depends on just what you need to do.
Rewrite is complex - learning curve - but you can serve alternative urls without giving a HTML code and things that seem imposible. But with great power comes complexity and lots of bugs.
If you are only doing a simple redirection - possibly matching some urls - redirect is the way to go.
When you can't do it with Redirect, you will probably want to start learning Mod_Rewrite.
I want to rewrite pagination URLs http://mydomain.com/category?start=15 to http://mydomain.com/category/start/15, but I don't know how to achieve this with .htaccess.
PS: those URls ( http://mydomain.com/category?start=15) are referenced in search engines so I need to add 301 redirect to my new URLs.
I want mention that I already enabled SEF mode in Jommla configuration
First, if you want your URLs to look like /start/15 you have to rewrite them from the pretty format to the internal, not otherwise.
I currently have no access to an Apache, but your expression should look something simliar to this:
RewriteRule ^category/start/([0-9]+)$ http://mydomain.com/category?start=$1 [QSA,L]
Then, it would be neccesary to tell Joomla how to generate the pretty URLs, this happens without the htaccess file, for example in a SEO plugin.
Finally, to output 301 messages, you will want to add "Redirect" commands to your .htaccess file. Redirect incoming ?start=15 URLs to the pretty format. Make sure that this does not happen after your Rewrite...
I have an e-commerce developed with the CMS Prestashop.
Yesterday i have seen in my Webmaster Tools that i had some duplicated URL, like this:
www.mysite.com/manufacturers
www.mysite.com/it/manufacturers.
Where 'it' is the suffix of the default and only language for the website.
I've already activate the friendly URL in the back-office and also I've a .htaccess file generated automatically by the generator in the back-office.
What should I do to fix this issue?
PS: Also I think that I've already taken a penalization from googlebot.
First of all let me clarify the Title from the SEO point of view. The problem is from Prestashop side not from SEO side. It is just affecting your SEO.
Now on the problem, Prestashop is notorious for URL problems. I would not recommend you the .htaccess hack solution because every time you regenerate your .htaccess from you backend, you have to manually insert that hack again in it to keep the problem down. And suppose this url problem arises again after sometime for some other url than you have to do it again. It can turn into a nightmare.
So here are some of my personal recommendations...
If this site is critical(which I am assuming), buy a Prestashop url rewriting module from a trusted provider. You will also get a technical support in case this problem arises again in future.
If you can't buy than I would suggest you to ask this question on Prestashop forums, as this is Prestashop specific, to permanently solve this problem. You will most likely to get more instant answers as you will find more people working on Prestashop there than here.
Somewhere either in the htaccess file in your document root, or in the vhost/server config for mysite.com, you'll need to 301 redirect. Now you just need to choose which one you want to keep, the one with /it/ in front or the one without? Let's say you want to point everything to the one without, you'll use one of these:
Using mod_alias:
Redirect 301 /it/manufacturers /manufacturers
Using mod_rewrite:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?mysite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^/?it/manufacturers(.*)$ /manufacturers$1 [L,R=301]