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.
Related
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 with thousands of pages that need to be redirected. I was thinking of using a 301 redirect in my .htaccess, but I'm just afraid that this will be very inefficient.
Would having a .htaccess with thousands of lines (there is no way to have a re-write rule, they have to be mapped one by one), mean that every time someone accesses one of our pages, they have to read the entire .htaccess? Is that a bad thing? This sit is in a shared host.
I saw a previous answer here about using RewriteMap. How is that different than having the 301 redirects?
Thanks
For simple page redirects 301 is the best and it's very fast. RewriteMap is for more complex rewrite functions or doing very specific rewrite tasks.
Before black listing your pages server side, I would try remapping with your application first.
If you set up the redirect with .htaccess those pages will be dead to Google which of course may or may not be a bad thing. Basically once Google indexes those redirects there really is no going back (SEO).
In short redirect wisely.
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=$1 [QSA,L]
Then, it would be neccesary to tell Joomla how to generate the pretty URLs, this happens without the htaccess file, for example in a SEO plugin.
Finally, to output 301 messages, you will want to add "Redirect" commands to your .htaccess file. Redirect incoming ?start=15 URLs to the pretty format. Make sure that this does not happen after your Rewrite...
Just wondering if its possible to 301 redirect an existing Rewriterule?
For example if I have the following line in my .htaccess file :
RewriteRule ^blue-widgets/ bluewidgets.php
and then I need to change my URL structure but the url "blue-widgets/" has a good ranking in the search engines which I dont wont to lose, is it possible to add another rewrite rule (301) that redirects that url too "newdirectory/blue-widgets/" ? If so, how is this done, is it a simple case of adding the new rewriterule under the existing one?
Does the fact that you have 2 rewrites, slow the page down or have any other problems?
You are confusing two quite different aspects: internal and external rewrites.
301 and 302 are external rewrites and in effect pass the redirect instruction back to the user's browser to do. 301 tells the browser (and the search engines) that the address change is permanent.
Rewrite rules without the [R] flag do an internal redirect -- that is a remapping inside the Apache / IIS subsystem than is not exposed to the outside world.
Yes, you can have multiple URI internally redirecting to the same target, but as you've written them, they will not be external and not 301s.
Try
RewriteRule ^blue-widgets/$ /new-directory/blue-widgets/ [L,NC,R=301]
RewriteRule ^new-directory/blue-widgets/$ bluewidgets.php [L,NC]
Does the fact that you have 2 rewrites, slow the page down or have any other problems?
The 301 to send blue-widgets to new-directory/blue-widgets is cached and will only happen once per client, so the performance should be minimally affected.
However, if you can, you should also change this link on your site to be new-directory/blue-widgets
I think this is a very stupid question so I apologise, as i think i may completely misunderstand mod_rewrite.
Say you have a URL
www.domain.com/products/item.php?id=1234
mod_rewrite can rewrite that to a friendly URL
wwww.domain.com/products/item/1234
(for example)
So, if i type in wwww.domain.com/products/item/1234 this will be rewritten to www.domain.com/products/item.php?id=1234 and that page is served. Fine.
But what if you type in www.domain.com/products/item.php?id=1234 - that page will be served but not rewritten to the friendly URL.
So my question is can you rewrite internal file names automatically? For example, all URLs on my site are currently in the www.domain.com/products/item.php?id=1234 format. When a user clicks this link can this be rewritten to the friendly URL? Or should you always hard code in the friendly URL?
Im sorry if that made little sense! Im getting confused because i want to rewrite non-friendly to friendly URL, but then serve the non friendly URL - so wont that cause an infinite redirect loop?
Mod_rewrite can't really internally rewrite URLs across domains, though it could proxy them (using P option in RewriteRule). Assuming that the domain is the same, you could do something to redirect the client's browser to a friendly URL if the old one is used while internally rewriting the friendly URL back to the old one, but they have to be both the same domain. You do this by looking at the actual request (%{THE_REQUEST}) variable instead of looking at the URI, which changes as they get rewritten internally.
This redirects the browser when the old URLs are used to the friendly URLs
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^([A-Z]{3,9})\ /products/item\.php
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} id=([0-9]+)
RewriteRule ^products/item\.php$ /products/item/%1? [R=301,L]
This rewrites internally when a friendly URL is used:
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^([A-Z]{3,9})\ /products/item/[0-9]+
RewriteRule ^products/item/([0-9]+) /products/item.php?id=$1 [QSA,L]
Mod_rewrite does not automatically rewrite the "none friendly" urls to the friendly urls. You have to add some rules yourself to do this.
Also Mod_rewrite does not modify the links inside your html, css, or whatever you use. You need to change those yourself.
If a user uses the friendly url, it will never know that it is rewritten. Mod_rewrite is tranparent from the user's point of view. You can add a [R] flag to your rules which makes apache send a redirect to the client. This way the client does see the rewritten url.
Redirecting the unfriendly to the fiendly url, should only be done to help search engines (and to prevent link-rot, but that's more rare). This can be done without a redirect loop, unlike Sergey says.
Try looking around here on SO to find a script that does the redirect from the unfriendly to the fiendly url. Let me know if you can't find it, and I'll help.