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
Related
I have a site where mydomain.com and mydomain.com/frontpage serves the exact same content.
Socalled SEO experts tell me it is very bad to have the same content on different addresses. Google will cast upon me a terrible fate.
So I thought fine, I'll just redirect mydomain.com to mydomain.com/frontpage, but I'm failing miserably. I just can't wrap my head around htaccess commands.
I need to have visitors who visits mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com to be redirected to www.mydomain.com/frontpage in a way to that it becomes visible in the browser address field.
BUT nothing else must be redirected.
For example, www.mydomain.com/anotherpage must still be there.
My .htaccess is already full of a lot of rewrite rules that redirects all of these user-friendly addresses to the real urls (index.php?pageid=341) etc. So I'm thinking I would first redirect mydomain.com to mydomain.com/frontpage and then let another RewriteRule later make sure that mydomain.com/frontpage actually points to index.php?pageid=341.
But mydomain.com => mydomain.com/frontpage must be a visible redirect, while all the other rewrite rules are hidden from the user.
How does the Redirect or RedirectMatch or RewriteRule look like, that redirects visitors from www.mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com/frontpage while keeping other addresses like e.g. www.mydomain.com/anotherpage ?
Thanks.
You can insert this new rule just below RewriteEngine On line:
RewriteRule ^/?$ /frontpage [L,R=301]
cPanel only allows me to create 'AddOn' domains. I have pointed all my TLDS to the server which saves them under 'public_html/main/sites' directories '/site1.com' , '/site2.com' etc. mainwebsite.com will be served under 'public_html' and all my client sites under 'public_html/main/sites'
It also creates subdomains 'username.mainsite.com' How can i prevent google from indexing those subdomains yet still index the TLDS. And stop users from being able to access the TLD from the subdomain too?
If i created a RewriteRule would google still index the TLD? Or is there a better way to go about this?
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.site1\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.site1.com/$1 [L,R=301]
If the 301-redirect works (for you), it will work for search engines, too.
See Google’s documentation:
301 redirects are particularly useful in the following circumstances:
[…]
People access your site through several different URLs. If, for example, your home page can be reached in multiple ways - for instance, http://example.com/home, http://home.example.com, or http://www.example.com - it's a good idea to pick one of those URLs as your preferred (canonical) destination, and use 301 redirects to send traffic from the other URLs to your preferred URL.
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 am permanently redirecting my website
http://www.oldsite.com
to
http://newsite.com/blog
Is there a difference between using
Redirect 301 / http://newsite.com/blog/
or
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newsite.com/blog/$1 [R=301,L]
Any reason I should use one over the other?
The first uses Apache's internal redirection engine to direct all requests to / to http://newsite.com/blog with a 301 Moved Permanently response code.
The other loads the Apache rewriting engine and rewrites all of the incoming requests that match ^(.*)$ to http://newsite.com/blog/ (appending the matched part of the request URI to the target URI) with a 301 Moved Permanently response code, like the former.
The difference? The former rewrites everything to http://newsite.com/blog/ regardless of the request, and the second takes into account the request URI rewriting it as specified. The first is also somewhat faster than the second because it does not load the rewriting engine, does not introspect the request itself, and (depending on the AllowOverride setting) does not have to look up and load .htaccess files.
I believe the performance difference between the two would be imperceptible to a user.
However, assuming that all of the URLs on the old blog site cleanly map to the new site, then I would recommend using the second method.
If you use the first method, all links to your old blog posts will end up on the home page of your new site, which is not a great experience for users who may have bookmarked links etc.
If you care about SEO, then its the same story, all of your page rank will go from your old blog posts to your new site home page.
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.