I guess, this is an easy one but anyway, I haven't figured it out yet.
After migrating my website from Joomla 3 to Joomla 4 the structure of categories and articles will change. That's why I will need some rules in .htaccess to redirect the old urls to the new ones.
The website is hosted on an Apache server.
The old URL structure looks something like that.
https://www.mydomain.de/category/subcategory/item/[articleID]-[articleAlias].html
[articleID] is a digit.
[articleAlias], e.g. „this-is-article-number-233“
This should be redirected to...
https://www.mydomain.de/newcategory/newsubcategory/[articleAlias].html
An example:
https://www.mydomain.de/category/subcategory/item/2324-this-is-my-latest-article.html
… should be redirected to...
https://www.mydomain.de/newcategory/newsubcategory/this-is-my-latest-article.html
I've played around with RedirectMatch and Rewrite Rule but haven't been successful to make it work. How do I get rid of the article id?
My latest try failed with...
RedirectMatch ^category/subcategory/item/([0-9]+)-(.*)$ /newcategory/newsubcategory/$1
Is there a simple and elegant solution to this? Thanks in advance!
UPDATE
Maybe it's more complex than I thought it was.
Main problem is that not only my categories changed but also the ids of the articles.
So, to stick with my example...
https://www.mydomain.de/category/subcategory/item/2324-this-is-my-latest-article.html
first turns into something like:
https://www.mydomain.de/newcategory/newsubcategory/1223-this-is-my-latest-article.html
Anyway, Joomla 4 is able to drop the article id automatically (guess with an internal rewrite) for seo-friendly URLs. I activated that feature to make the new URLs look like
https://www.mydomain.de/newcategory/newsubcategory/[articleAlias].html
The [articleAlias] stays the same.
A redirection according to what you actually ask should be possible like that:
RewriteEngine on
RedirectRule ^/?category/subcategory/item/[0-9]+-(.*)\.html$ /newcategory/newsubcategory/$1.html [R,L]
However I doubt that this really is what you want: this completely drops the numeric ID of the resource. Which means that it won't be available for processing when the redirected request comes back requesting the new, stripped URL. How do you want to internally rewrite that request back to the internal resource then, without that ID?
I made some more tests and it this is the final solution to my problem:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/?category/subcategory/item/[0-9]+-(.*)\.html$ /newcategory/newsubcategory/$1.html
I've got a site using jQuery Tools tabs and Ajax. It works fine if you start out at the home page:
http://bdbcreative.com/home.htm
Click on any of the tabs and you get the extended Ajax address, which is what client wants and seems to be necessary for jScrollPane to work (http://bdbcreative.com/home.htm#web-design.htm).
But if someone just enters the domain - http://bdbcreative.com - "home.htm" never gets written and I end up with a URL like http://bdbcreative.com/#web-design.htm, which breaks jScrollPane.
I'm thinking I can use .htaccess to fix this, but I can't figure out the syntax. Can someone point me in the right direction. For consistency's sake, I'd like to have any site root URLs (http://bdbcreative.com or http:www.bdbcreative.com/ etc.) redirect to the home.htm address (i.e., http://bdbcreative.com/home.htm)
Thanks - Joe
After trying umpteen thousand examples, I found one that did what I needed.
For the .htacess file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^$ http://www.bdbcreative.com/index.htm [R=301,L]
Hope this helps someone else.
Best - Joe
UPDATED
I didn't understand how to make this work so I hope you know because I didn't found more solutions:
I have implemented jquery cycle in wordpress with the window.location.hash to make an individual url from each slide (example here http://jquery.malsup.com/cycle/perma.html)
Now I have an indez with some selected photos of differents categories that works with hashes like localhost/prueba/#men/#work61, localhost/prueba/#women/#work15, etc...the trick is that I have also the category /men/ and the photo #work61 permanetly cause the index may change but not the photo in the category indeed. So what I need is change the url without reloading from /#men/ to /men/ and if they share a link they will always go to the right photo and section (did I explain it well ?)
I have been testing many ways to arrive, with history.js and even with the aisle Pushestate but I didn't found the right solution. Lately I have made this with htaccess and it's closely what I need
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /prueba/
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ $1/#$2 [NE,R]
This changes me from localhost/prueba/men/work61 to localhost/prueba/men/#work61 but if I tried to add a hash to the first folder (#men), an also only work if somebody put the link directly
Any idea? Thanks in advance
I think you need to understand the URI specification, section 3.5 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986#section-3.5. Essentially, in the context of a web browser displaying HTML documents, the URI fragment (after the #) refers to a subset of the resource (page).
Basically if you removed the # from your URL, you will not be referring to a different subset of the same resource, but another resource entirely. So another page will be requested.
I need to redirect incoming requests for a page to a subdirectory whilst keeping the URL displayed as originally typed.
This is to manage language pages easier.
For example, I want Spanish pages to be under www.mydomain.com/es. I want the URL displayed to remain www.mydomain.com/es.
But the actual page is held here - www.mydomain.com/international/es
This means I can keep my root folder tidy and have all the language pages in one directory. But I want it to be easy for language specific visitors to find thier page.
Can anyone point me in the right direction? I've had a go but to be honest I always manage to produce server errors and get in a mess.
Many thanks
TT
Provided you are on an apache server look up mod_rewrite.
Example for your .htaccess:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^es/([0-9a-zA-Z\/]*)$ /international/es/$1 [L]
At my work we have various web pages that, my boss feels, are being ranked lower than they should be because "mywebsite.org/category/" looks like a different URL to search engines than "mywebsite.org/category/index.php" does, even though they show the same file. I don't think it works this way but he's convinced. Maybe I'm wrong though. I have two questions:
How do i make it so that it will say "index.php" in the address bar of all subcategories?
Is this really how pagerank works?
Besides changing all the links everywhere, a simpler solution is to use a rewrite rule. Make sure it is a permanent redirect, or Google will keep using the old link (without index.php). How you do this exactly depends on your web server, but for Apache HTTPd it looks something like the example given below.
Yes. Or so I've heard. Very few people know for sure. But Google mentions this guideline (as "Be consistent"). Make sure to check out all of Google's Webmaster guidelines.
Apache config for rewrite rule:
# in the generic config
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
# in your virutal host
RewriteEngine On
# redirect everything that ends in a slash to the same, but with index.php added
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1/index.php [R=301,L]
# or the other way around, as suggested
# RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.php$ $1/ [R=301,L]
Adding this code to the top of every page should also work:
<?php
if (substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], -1) == '/') {
$new_request_uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'].'index.php';
header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header('Location: '.$new_request_uri);
exit;
}
?>
You don't tell us if you're using straight PHP or some other framework, but for PHP, probably you just need to change all the links on your site to "mywebsite.org/category/index.php".
I think it's possible that this does affect your search engine rank. However, you would be better off using only "mywebsite.org/category" rather than adding "index.php" to each one.
Bottom line is that you need to make sure all your links in your website use one or the other. What actually gets shown in the address bar is unimportant.
A simple solution is to put in the <head> tag:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://mywebsite.org/category/" />
Then, no matter which page the search engine ends up on, it will know it is simply a different view of /category/
And for your second question--yes, it can affect your results, if Google thinks you are spamming. If it wasn't, they wouldn't have added support for rel="canonical". Although I wouldn't be surprised if they treat somedir/index.* the same as somedir/
I'm not sure if /category/ and /category/index.php are considered two urls for seo, but there is a good chance that it will effect them, one way or another. There is nothing wrong with making a quick change just to be sure.
A few thoughts:
URLs
Rather than adding /index.php, you will be better off making it so there is no index.php on any of them, since the keyword 'index' is probably not what you want.
You can make a script that will check if the URL of the current page ends in index.php and remove it, then forward to the resulting URL.
For example, on one of my sites, I require the 'www.' for my domain (www.domain.com and domain.com are considered two URLs for search purposes, though not always), so I have a script that checks each page and if there is no www., it ads it, and forwards.
if (APPLICATION_LIVE) {
if ( (strtolower($_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"]) != "www.domain.com") ) {
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); // Recognized by search engines and may count the link toward the correct URL...
header("Location: " . 'www.domain.com/'.$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] );
exit();
}
}
You could mode that to do what you need.
That way, if a crawler visits the wrong URL, it will be notified that it was replaced with the correct URL. If a person visits the wrong URL, they will be forwarded to the correct URL (most won't notice), and then if they copy the url from the browser to send someone or link to that page, they will end up linking to the correct url for that page.
LINKING URLS
They way other pages link to your pages is more important for seo. Make sure all your in-site links use the proper URL (without /index.php), and that if you have a 'link to this page' feature, it doesn't include the /index.php part. You can't control how everyone links to you, but you can take some control over it, like with the script in item 1.
URL ROUTING
You may also want to consider using some sort of framework or stand-alone URL rerouting scheme. It could make it so there were more keywords, etc.
See here for an example: http://docs.kohanaphp.com/general/routing
I agree with everyone who's saying to ditch the index.php. Please don't force your visitor to type index.php if not typing it could get them the same result.
You didn't say if you're on an IIS or Apache server.
IIS can be set to assume index.php is the default page so that http:// mywebsite.org/ will resolve correctly without including index.php.
I would say that if you want to include the default page and force your users to type the page name in the url, make the page name meaningful to a search engine and to your visitors.
Example:
http://mywebsite.org/teaching-web-scripting.php
is far more descriptive and beneficial for SEO rankings than just
http://mywebsite.org/index.php
Might want to take a look at robots.txt files? Not quite the best solution, but you should be able to implement something workable with them...