using mod_rewrite to create SEO friendly URLS - .htaccess

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]

Related

htaccess redirect not working for long url

How do I redirect the following long link:
http://www.vbpmonitor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=24&utm_source=MagnetMail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=asmith#panaceainc.com&utm_content=EVVWP040716&utm_campaign=White%20Paper%3A%20Optimizing%20VBM%20Quality%20Tiering%20for%20Physicians
to
http://www.vbpmonitor.com/optimizing-vbm-quality-tiering-for-physicians
Redirect 301 /index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=24&utm_source=MagnetMail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=asmith#panaceainc.com&utm_content=EVVWP040716&utm_campaign=White%20Paper%3A%20Optimizing%20VBM%20Quality%20Tiering%20for%20Physicians http://www.vbpmonitor.com/optimizing-vbm-quality-tiering-for-physicians
As said above in the comments I suspect that you have a glitch in your logic here and that in reality you want to redirection to work the other way 'round. Redirecting from the long to the search engine friendly URL simply does not make any sense. So:
Using a Redirect rule you could try that instead:
Redirect 301 /optimizing-vbm-quality-tiering-for-physicians /index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=24&utm_source=MagnetMail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=asmith#panaceainc.com&utm_content=EVVWP040716&utm_campaign=White%20Paper%3A%20Optimizing%20VBM%20Quality%20Tiering%20for%20Physicians
This will redirect an incoming request to the short URL to the actually existing long URL. That is the usual scenario.
If however you really want to redirect that short URL to the long version, then you cannot do that with a Redirect rule. This might for example be the case if you accidentally sent out that long URL and have a working redirection setup for the short version. Unfortunately you do not explain anything about that in your question or comments, so I can only guess here.
You'd have to use the more flexible rewriting module and use a combination of RewriteCond and RewriteRule. That allows to "cut out" specific patterns of request URLs and to "redesign" how the request should look like after the rewriting.
This would be a simple example that applies two conditions to rewriting the request for file index.php to the long URL:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} view=article
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} id=24
RewriteRule ^/?index\.php$ /optimizing-vbm-quality-tiering-for-physicians [L,R=301]
Note: this version should work both in the http servers host configuration and also in those .htaccess style files. Where you always should prefer the first option if you have access.
As said above, I can only guess here with the sparse information you provided. I picked two out of many request arguments, since those appear to be the ones best suited as distinct identifiers. But you may have to tweak things. Note that per default RewriteConds are combined by a logical AND, so they both have to resolve to something truish.
For more precise details about this stuff I would like to point you to the official documentation of those modules again. The documentation is extremely precise, well written and comes with good examples. I would always prefer the information there to snippets you find somewhere in the internet or partial answers to questions...
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_alias.html#redirect
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html

.htaccess rewrite url that has already been changed

I am upgrading my site which involves new scripts and a different URL
structure. There are currently a few thousand pages so I want to
basically move them in to a subdirectory so that they are not lost.
I am not very confident with htaccess so can someone please confirm that
the first part I have done is correct:
Old URL: http://www.example.com/article/another-dir/page-group/whatever.html
RewriteRule ^article/?$ http://www.example.com/archive/ [R=301,NC,L]
To achieve this: http://www.example.com/archive/another-dir/page-group/whatever.html
Search engines will see the above as a permanent move and in the address bar
it will show the new url. Is this right?
The second part is on the new script - the url's could be improved but I am
unable to change all the script so thought about using htaccess again but am
not sure if it can be achieved like this.
At the moment the url looks like this:
url: http://www.example.com/category/4/categoryname
In the htaccess the current rewrite rule for this type of url looks like this:
RewriteRule ^category/(.*)/(.*)$ category.php?id=$1&slug=$2
Is it possible to change this so that in the url address bar I end up
with this:
http://www.example.com/categoryname
Basically I don't want to see either the number or category/ in the resulting
url as it will be easier for visitors to use - is that possible??
Thanks in advance for any help.
The second question related to passing in URI components for querystring redirect and then hiding those components in the URL I don't think would be easy, if even possible, using RewriteRules.
For the first question though. Given the sample URLs you mentioned, the RewriteRule would need to include capture and backreference if you want to preserve the full URL in the redirection. For example:
RewriteRule ^article/?(.*)$ http://www.example.com/archive/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

How to redirect a folder and its pages to a single page

I'm trying to redirect some files and I'm pretty stuck. There are way too many to do some of them on a "page-per-page" basis and so I need a quick way as these pages are insignificant but return 404's at the moment.
I have a page like this "/old-blog/tag/page", I previously redirected the "old-blog" to "new-blog" so I get "/new-blog/tag/page" but now I want "tag" and all pages after this to be sent to "new-blog". I hope this example makes sense, please ask if I've missed something.
I'm doing my redirects with my .htaccess file so I'd like a method I can use with this in mind.
Thanks, Dan.
You may already have rewrite rules, if there are rules that do some type of routing, then mod_rewrite and mod_alias is going to conflict (RedirectMatch is mod_alias). So try sticking with just mod_rewrite. Try adding these rules, above any other rules, in the htaccess file in your document root:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/?old-blog/tag /new-blog/ [L,R=301]

mod_rewrite: How to disable not clean urls navigation of rewrite rules

I've been enabled mod_rewrite module and all is right.
I created simple rules for the url, but how do I disable the url navigation (rewritten) with the parameters?
example:
# rewrite rule for cleaning
RewriteRule ^bookstore/([0-9]+)?$ /bookstore/book.php?id=$1 [L]
Now, if I navigate to http://mydomine.com/bookstore/123 all is done, but the url http://mydomine.com/bookstore/book.php?id=123 is also navigable.
How can I make visible and bavigable only the first one?
Add this to the same htaccess file:
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /bookstore/book\.php\?id=([0-9]*)
RewriteRule ^bookstore/book\.php$ /bookstore/%1? [L,R=301]
This will 301 redirect requests for the URI with query strings to the one without.
Not 100% sure about this, but I think that if you rewrite A to B, then both A and B will work.
I would like to ask why exactly is it a problem that http://mydomine.com/bookstore/book.php?id=123 is navigable too? What is the problem if that link is valid too, and the user can use both links... although it would take them some time and luck to discover the second option. What would they gain by doing that? What would you lose? If the answer in both cases is "nothing", then simply stop worrying. :) If you used the old links previously and now replace then with new links, then it is a good thing that your customer's old bookmarks will still work.
But assuming that you have a good reason for disabling the old URLs, how about changing them both. For example rename "book.php" to "xyz.php" and then redirect http://mydomine.com/bookstore/123 to http://mydomine.com/bookstore/xyz.php?id=123 -- and the old http://mydomine.com/bookstore/book.php?id=123 will stop working.
Ok, that is an ugly solution, but you can make it nicer if instead of renaming the files you just move them to a subdirectory, like http://mydomine.com/xyz/bookstore/book.php?id=123 . Alternatively, you could use the redirect to add a "secret" parameter and then check it in the PHP file, for example rewrite http://mydomine.com/bookstore/123 to http://mydomine.com/bookstore/book.php?id=123&secret=xyz . Sure, it's just a "security by obscurity", but again... what exactly would anyone gain by discovering your true URLs?

301 Redirect to change structure

I have been researching redirects for a few days now and am still struggling, so I decided to post my first question here. For some reason, it is just not clicking for me.
I have redesigned and developed a client's WordPress site and need to update it's structure.
The site's current structure is:
www.domain.com/blog/postname/2011/12/26/
The new structure should be:
www.domain.com/blog/postname
I really thought this was going to be easy since all I am looking to do is drop the date, but have not been able to grasp the whole wildcard aspect and how to end what I am trying to match. Any help would be greatly appreciated. A simple answer is great, but an explanation would be even better.
I am assuming you already know how to change your WordPress permalink structure to drop the date.
To 301 redirect all of the old URLs to the new ones, add the following rules to your .htaccess file in the root of your websites domain, ahead of any existing rules that are there.
#if these 2 lines already exist, skip them and add the rest
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
# if there is a request of the form /blog/post-name/yyyy/mm/dd/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/blog/[^/]+/)[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{2}/$ [NC]
#redirect the request to the URL without the date
RewriteRule . %1 [L,R=301]
If you want to learn more about .htaccess/rewriting you can take a look at the following urls: Indepth htaccess, Brief Introduction to Rewriting, Apache Mod_rewrite.
Let me know if this works for you and/or you have any issues.

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