I have a problem in redirecting a URL on a Silverstripe website. I have a news feed page with a summary of articles in a paginated style. It displays 20 articles initially and switches to the next 20 based on the page number chosen. It is just the standard blog layout. When I click on page 2 then it should navigate to https://*****/news/?count=20 and for page 3 as https://*****/news/?count=40 etc. However upon clicking the blog page number it navigates to https://*****/news/news/?count=20. So the navigation link is not rewriting the parent URL.
All of my other Silverstripe websites work fine with the same blog layout except this and I don't see any reason to tweak the default code. I thought of adding a .htaccess redirect like this
Redirect 301 /news/news/?start=20 https://******/news/?start=20
but I didn't have any luck to make it work. Kindly suggest me a solution for this.
The output I expect is to redirect to the right URL
https://******/news/?start=20
Here is a simple redirection rule that should fix the symptom you describe:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/?news/news/(.*)$ /news/$1 [R=301,L]
But I doubt that approach is a good idea. Simply because it tries to fix a symptom, not the cause. The cause is that you actually create requests to URLs that contain the /news/news/ issue which should never happen. I assume the cause of that issue is that you hand out relative references (so something like news/...) instead of absolute references (/news/...). I strongly suggest that you handle the cause instead of trying to fix the symptom.
I'm working on my htaccess and I finally got a result I can deal with. First I've got this
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^blog/([a-zA-Z0-9\-/\.]+)/?$ blog.php?id=$1article_title=$2 [L]
This helps show my urls like so:
https://www.mydomain.com/blog.php?id=10
To
https://www.mydomain.com/blog/10/title.com
https://www.mydomain.com/blog/10/
https://www.mydomain.com/blog/10
https://www.mydomain.com/blog/10/title.com/
Four things here...
First is that all of these are accessible. I only want the first to appear and the others to direct there.
Second is that the article title will have spaces. Is there a way to turn spaces into - rather than have spaces?
Third is...is it okay to have .com within the url at the end? It just happens to be part of a post article title.
Fourth is do I include the extra part of the url$article_title in the urls I use? I'm lost on that part. Is it the same as I did with the id?
Last I was curious to know if I needed the id to show up. Can I exclude that in some way?
If I have urls already in place that use blog.php?id=10 do I change that to the new one? If I can't find it I'd like the url to go to the first rewritten url. All of the possible examples should go to that first url. or one without the id.
I have an htaccess rule that goes:
RewriteRule ^Commercial-Units/For-Sale/(([a-zA-Z]+)*/([0-9]+)*/([a-zA-Z]+)*/([0-9]+)*/([a-zA-Z]+)*/([0-9]+)*)*$ pages/index.php?f=quicksearch&cust_wants=1&want_type=2&at=$3&start=$5&limit=$7 [R=302,L]
This is specifically designed for when a page requires paging records.
I have been trying to find solutions over everywhere in Google and Stackoverflow.com..
The problem is that everytime someone clicks on, say page 2, the address bar keeps on adding my query strings like so:
http://mysite.com/Commerial-Units/For-Sale/page/2/at/10/limit/7/page/2/at/10/limit/7
notice that the url above containes multiple key-value combinations duplicated and this goes on and on everytime someone clicks on the next page...
Hope someone can point me to the right solution to this...
Thank you very much!
Thats not a problem with your rewrite but with your site code the links are adding /page/2/at/10/limit/7 to the current url you need to remove the previous params using something like ../../../../../../page/2/at/10/limit/7
And if that is for SEO please use parameters for pagination, only use SEO friendly urls for categories and items, no need to index every single pagination option, as that will be duplicated content.
I have a cms that does not generate friendly url's
What is the best way to rename this without getting double content by google.
Now I have in .htacces:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule welcome.html page.php?1[L]
RewriteRule about-us.html page.php?2[L]
Is this the best way to do?
Any help would be appreciated
Google has no problem spidering and indexing this very simple dynamic URL scheme. But if you want extra onpage-optimization-bonus-points with the help of keyword-stuffed-URLs it would be best you switch to a CMS that creates them automatically. You save time by avoiding to maintain the link-scheme manually both in your content and the rule-file.
If not there's always the chance you forget to replace those dynamic links with your readable ones if you create new content. Also your cms will always answer both variants: the friendly one and the dynamic one, so you have to tell Google the "canonical" URL (Explanation here) to avoid duplicate content. This might happen because you can't tell how people link to content on your site.
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...