I have a search engine on my site with two search parameters, location and query. I want to show the results on a page with the canonical URL of /search/location/query.
I tried aiming the search at a non-existant PHP file which I could then rewrite using my .htaccess:
# search bar rewrites
RewriteRule ^search.php?query=([A-Za-z_-]+)&location=([A-Za-z_-]+)$ /search/$1/$2/ [R]
This doesn't seem to be working, however, and after setting my search form to post GET to search.php I just get a 404. I would prefer not to have to use Javascript to submit the form directly to the canonical url - any way I can rewrite it dynamically with mod rewrite?
Wouldn't the better approach be to change the form from a get to post?
Generally pretty URIs are for actual locations rather than search results.
Related
I am using the Wordpress plugin, Timely All-in-One events calendar. Unfortunately it is creating a plethora of duplicate URLs which end in strings like (https://www.mywebsite.com/events/action~agenda/page_offset~-2/request_format~json/cat_ids~4) or (https://www.mywebsite.com/events/action~oneday/exact_date~2-4-2019/) for example.
As a consequence of these URL directives each being for a different calendar view but containing the same webpage title and content, some search engines are seeing this as duplicate content. Whilst robots.txt is setup to tell bots to ignore the URLs containing said strings, some crawlers are ignoring robots.txt. I have also disabled the various different calendar views so there is now only the agenda view but even in spite of this, bots continue to crawl these URLs.
Therefore is it possible to use Apache/ a .htaccess directive to tell the server to direct any requests containing "/action~" to either remove the string from the URL so the browser just reads "/events/" or to redirect/forward the URLs to another page.
There are over 500 of these URLs so I ideally would like a quick remedy!
Thanks in advance.
Check this rewrite in your .htaccess file
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^events\/action(.*)$ /events/ [L,R=301]
firstly I know and understand how to redirect based on parameters :)
My issue is that I need to redirect all links based on the supplied MenuID parameter and ignore any other information in the query string, as not all parameters are used in each web page request, e.g. menuid=2738421; is New Products
http://www.domain.com/shop.php?menuid=2738421&menuref=Ja&menutitle=New+Products& limit=5&page=24
or,
http://www.domain.com/shop.php?menuid=2738421&menuref=Ja&menutitle=New+Products&limit=20&page=3
or,
http://www.domain.com/shop.php?menuid=2738421&menuref=Ja&page=12&limit=15
to
http://www.domain.com/new.html?page=x&limit=x
The reason for the redirection is that search-engines have indexed these pages and so I need to prettify the URLs.
Is this actually possible to create a fuzzy redirect criteria?
## 301 Redirects
# 301 Redirect 1 - works for this explicit URL, but need a partial result
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$
RewriteRule ^new\.html$ http://www.monarchycatering.com/shop.php?menuid=2738421&menuref=Ja&menutitle=New+Products&limit=5&page=24 [R=301,NE,NC,L]
Any help gratefully taken, thank you in advance
Mark.
Sorry for the delay, but StackOverflow doesn't seem to have a way to flag answers that have been replied to and need my attention.
OK, if I understand you correctly, you have an incoming "reduced" semi-SEF URL out in the real world (produced by your links), such as
http://www.domain.com/new.html&limit=5&page=24
("real" SEF would be something like http://www.domain.com/new/limit/5/page/24.html)
and you need to use .htaccess to map it to real files and more Query String information:
http://www.domain.com/shop.php?menuid=2738421&menuref=Ja&menutitle=New+Products&limit=5&page=24
You want to detect new.html for example, and replace it by a fixed string shop.php?menuid=2738421&menuref=Ja&menutitle=New+Products&, using the [QSA] flag to append the existing Query String on to the end?
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^new\.html /shop.php?menuid=2738421&menuref=Ja&menutitle=New+Products [QSA]
RewriteRule ^sale\.html /shop.php?menuid=32424&menuref=Ja&menutitle=Products+On+Sale [QSA]
...etc...
I believe that a & will be stuck on the end of the rewritten address if the user supplied a non-empty Query String, but be sure to test it both ways.
P.S. It probably would have been cleaner to use "comment" to reply to my question, rather than adding another answer.
It's not clear to me what your starting point is and where you're trying to end up. Do you have "pretty" URLs that you want to convert into "non-pretty" Query Strings that your scripts can actually digest?
The reason for the redirection is that search-engines have indexed
these pages and so I need to prettify the URLs.
If the search engines have already indexed the Query String non-pretty version, they'll have to now re-index with pretty URLs. Ditto for all your customers' bookmarks.
If you want to generate "pretty" links within your site, and decode them (in .htaccess) upon re-entry to non-pretty Query Strings, that should work. Your customers' existing bookmarks should even continue to work, while the search engines will replace the non-pretty with the pretty URLs.
and thanks for the interest in my question...
I have rewritten parts of my website and Google still has references to the old MenuID parameter and shop.php configuration, but now I rewriten the Query to a prettier format, e.g.
http://www.domain.com/shop.php?menuid=2738421&menuref=Ja&menutitle=New+Products&limit=5&page=24
is now
http://www.domain.com/new.html&limit=5&page=24
The pages represent product categories, and so needed to be displayed in a more meaningful manner. Customer bookmarking is not an issue, as long as I can redirect the pages.
I hope that makes sense, best wishes,
Mark.
I'm building a new site using Joomla and I've selected 'Search Engine Friendly URLs' and 'Use URL rewriting' in the Global Configuration which gives good SEF URLs but not quite perfect!
If a link to a page doesn't have a menu item associated to it the URL would look like this:
example.com/10-category/5-article
I want to remove the numbers and the hyphen using htaccess so it looks like:
example.com/category/article
I've made Rewrite Rule's in my htaccess file that looks like this:
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)-(.*)/([0-9]+)-(.*)$ /$1$2/$3$4 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)(.*)/([0-9]+)(.*)$ /$2/$4 [R=301,L]
The browsers address bar now shows the URL I want, example.com/category/article but the page shows a 404 error!
Is it something to do with the Joomla SEF?
What am I doing wrong?
*Update*
The first RewriteRule which removes the hyphen only works OK by itself, I only receive the 404 error page when both RewriteRule's are active.
This is a blind guess, Joomla probably needs those numbers to know which content to serve. It cannot just tell by the name of the category or article (in fact in most of these cases you can even leave it out), but it's the number that's important.
So when you're rewriting the URL without the numbers, you're requesting pages that Joomla has no idea how to handle, and it'll give you a 404. The only solution would be to write a plugin or something that maps the names of categories and articles to the corresponding IDs, but that's not going to be easy.
Concerning SEO, I don't think the number in the url is that much of a negative effect. If the rest of your website's SEO is good then this won't matter.
I've been searching google for this but can't find the solution to my exact needs. Basically I've already got my URL's named how I like them i.e. "http://mysite.com/blog/page1.php"
What I'm trying to achieve (if it's possible!) is to use rewrite to alter the existing URLS to: "http://mysite.com/blog/page1"
The problem I've come across is I've found examples that will do this if the user enters "http://mysite.com/blog/page1" into the broweser which is great, however I need it to work for the existing links in google as not to loose traffic, so incoming URLS "http://mysite.com/blog/page1.php" are directed to "http://mysite.com/blog/page1".
The 1st example (Canonical URLs) at the following is pretty much what you want:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html#url
This should do the trick, rewriting requests without .php to have it, invisible to the user.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/blog/([^.]+)$ /blog/$1.php
You will need to write a rewrite rule for mapping your old url's to your new url as a permanent redirect. This will let the search engine know that the new, seo friendly url's are the ones to be used.
RewriteRule blog/page1.php blog/page1 [R=301,L]
This is a totally new area for me so please be patient. I want to create "permalinks" for a dynamic site I am working on. At the moment all the pages (not the index) are referenced using an ID variable thus:
http://www.domainname.com/page.php?ID=122 (etc)
I want to create a suitable rewrite rule so that a useable URL would be more like this:
http://www.domainname.com/page/'pagetitle'.html (could be .php doen't matter)
Page title is stored in the database and obviously is linked directly to the ID
Am I right in thinking thr rewrite rule would be something like this?
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(([^&]*&)*)ID=([^&]+)(&+(.*))?$
RewriteRule ^page\.php$ /page/%3?%1%5 [L,R=301]
My ideal would be to just create
http://www.domainname.com/'pagetitle'.html
But have absolutly no idea how to do that.
Now the other question/sub question.
If the rewrite works i.e. you type in http://www.domainname.com/page/'pagetitle'.html to a browser address bar does the htaccess file work "the other way" in accessing the page http://www.domainname.com/page.php?ID=122 or do I have to create a function to take the 'pagetitle'.html bit of the URL and convert it to page.php?ID=122 ?
Also, sorry, but this is all new; if I create a site map (xml or php etc) using http://www.domainname.com/page/'pagetitle'.html will the SE spiders go to http://www.domainname.com/page.php?ID=122? or di I need to create the sitemap using the ID variables?
Question 1 and 2:
The condition is not required in this case. Use it like this:
RewriteRule ^/page/([\w-]+).html$ /page.php?title=$1 [L,R=301]
This transforms
/page/blabla.html to /page.php?title=blabla
You need to find the right page using the title parameter in page.php
Question 3:
I suggest you never use the querystring variant of the urls in any of your anchor links or xml sitemap. This way the spiders will only know of the friendly urls.