OK, I'm looking to use mod rewrite to write seo friendly urls for my site. It works fine on my xampp local testing server. However, I'm having problems when trying to put it live, it doesn't seem to work at all.
Here's what I've written in my htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^category/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ category.php?location=$1
So the idea is to change mysite.com/category.php?location=londonto mysite.com/category/london.
Initially I though it may be an issue with the ability to mod rewrite being switched on on GoDaddy's end, so I contacted GoDaddy to see if it that was the case and their response was that: "Mod_rewrite is an Apache Web server module installed on all of our Linux servers by default; it does not have to be installed or enabled. Our Linux hosting accounts support most mod_rewrite functions. Because enabling mod_rewrite is handled at a global level, you do not need to enable it in your httpd.conf file. You only need to add the desired code to the body of your .htaccess file."
And they bascially implied that the error is not with them and with my code. I'm not very experienced with mod rewrites and it seemed to work fine when I wrote it like this on other servers. Is there something special you have to write with godaddy? Am I missing something? Thanks!
Is that all in your htaccess file? What error do you get when visiting a desired URL, is it a 500 Internal Server error?
What I usualy add by default is an If-statement:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^category/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)$ category.php?location=$1 [L]
</IfModule>
By the way, note the _- at the end of the charset in the rule, for instance New York has a SEF version which is new-york, category/new-york would fail in your RewriteRule.
Related
I've read plenty of Stackoverflows but I seem to be missing something.
I have a PHP application running on https://subdomain.example.com/page/x but for SEO reasons I want people/bots to see https://example.com/subdomain/page/x.
I can rewrite the URL by using:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} subdomain.example.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://example.com/subdomain/$1 [L,NC,QSA]
This rewrite results in: https://example.com/subdomain/page/x, but I keep recieving a 404 error since the "main" domain doesn't know the path /subdomain/page/x of course.
What I want is to have the URL https://example.com/subdomain/page/x but run it on https://subdomain.example.com/ in the background since this is the place where the PHP application is running.
Is this possible? How should I do this?
There is no strong SEO reason not to use subdomains. See Do subdomains help/hurt SEO? I recommend using subdirectories most of the time but subdomains when they are warranted.
One place where subdomains are warranted is when your content is hosted on a separate server in a separate hosting location. While it is technically possible to serve the content from a subdirectory from the separate server, that comes with its own set of SEO problems:
It will be slow.
It will introduce duplicate content.
From a technical standpoint, you would need to use a reverse proxy to on your example.com webserver to fetch content for the /subdomain/ subdirectory from subdomain.example.com. The code for doing so in the .htaccess file of example.com would be something like:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^subdomain/(.*)$ https://subdomain.example.com/$1 [P]
The [P] flag means "reverse proxy" which will cause the server to fetch the content from the remote subdomain. This will necessarily make it slower for users. So much so that it would be better for SEO to use a subdomain.
For this to work you would also need to leave the subdomain up and running and serving content for the main server to fetch. This causes duplicate content. You could solve this issue by implementing canonical tags pointing to the subdirectory.
This requires several Apache modules to be available. On my Debian based system I needed to run sudo a2enmod ssl proxy rewrite proxy_connect proxy_http and sudo service apache2 reload. I also had to add SSLProxyEngine on in my <VirtualHost> directive for the site I wanted to use this on.
I have the following excerpt in my .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
# Whether RewriteBase is commented does not appear to have an impact on my problem
# RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^admin/(.*) members/$1 [L]
The idea is that the pages in /admin load from the /members directory, since certain features are duplicated between them, so that I don't have to duplicate my code. (There are other directives in the file that are related to a CMS system, and those are working as expected.)
On the current Apache 2.2 server, everything works fine. My client's webhost wants to upgrade to a server with Apache 2.4, and on the test server the rewrite rule fails. Instead of loading the page, it just displays "File not found."
All other rules are executed as expected, it's just that one that fails. I have tried adding/removing / characters and removing [L] from the rule, it always fails. I tried adding [R] to send the redirect to the browser, but even that failed. But if I change the url to the same filename but in the members directory, then the file loads successfully.
Being able to change one directory name to another seems like a pretty basic function of mod_rewrite. What am I missing?
Running LAMP stack...
I'm attempting to redirect my company's domain.com/blog traffic to a new sub-domain (e.g. blog.domain.com) while preserving any trailing URL after the sub-directory (domain.com/blog/article1234 turns into blog.domain.com/article1234).
I've attempted several variations with my .htaccess file using rewrite rules and conditions and this seems to be the closest I've gotten to success:
RewriteRule ^blog/?$ https://blog.domain.com/ [NC,R,L]
I also thought I was getting close with this:
RewriteRule ^blog/(.*)$ blog.domain.com/?p=$1 [R=302,L]
But that ended up breaking URLs somehow. I don't personally care if it's 302 or 301 - we intend to keep this sub-domain indefinitely but I've had nightmarish issues with 301s in the past. Open to anything at this point.
Thoughts? Thanks in advance.
Your second attempt was close to perfect, I just made some small modifications:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/?blog/?(.*)$ blog.domain.com/$1 [R=302,END,QSA]
In case you use an older apache server you may have to replace the END flag with the L flag which usually works unless you have conflicting rules.
And a general hint: you should always prefer to place such rules inside the http servers host configuration instead of using .htaccess style files. Those files are notoriously error prone, hard to debug and they really slow down the server. They are only provided as a last option for situations where you do not have control over the host configuration (read: really cheap hosting service providers) or if you have an application that relies on writing its own rewrite rules (which is an obvious security nightmare).
I am attempting to redirect & rewrite some dynamic PHP URL's to pretty and SEO friendly URLs. I have manged to do this successfully through .htaccess with the following code:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^somevar=green&nodescription=([a-zA-Z0-9_-]*)$
RewriteRule (.*) /green\/%1\/? [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^green/([^/]*)/$ /script.php?somevar=green&nodescription=$1&rewrite=on [L]
This creates a somewhat pretty URL as follows:
http://www.mysite.com/green/aA43-/
As I say, this works absolutley fine. Apart from one thing. The parameter nodescription contains a non-descriptive random set of letters, numbers and other characters.
I would like to rewrite the nodescription parameter to a more descriptive one. I understand that I can do this with a rewritemap through Apache. However, I have no experience at doing soemthing like this, and I'm not entirely sure where to start.
Normally I would simply alter script.php so that it contains more descriptive parameters, but this time I have no control over the script; I am pulling it from another site using cURL.
Can anybody give me an example of how to pull this off?
Thanks!
Matt
Well, to answer my own question, to pull this off you need access httpd.conf file on your apache server. My shared hosting company didn't allow access to this file (I doubt any would allow you access).
So I bit the bullet and purchased a VPS. I will post the steps I took here in order to set the rewritemap up in the hope that it will help a lost soul :) Ok, here goes...
My VPS has WHM installed, so in WHM I went to:
Server Configuration >> Apache Configuration >> Include Editor
Pre Virtual Host Include >> All Versions
This feature takes any text you put in and includes it in your httpd.conf file without worrying that it will be overwritten at a later stage. If you don't have WHM on your server then you can add the text directly to your httpd.conf file; make sure it is outside and before any virtual hosts.
OK, so I included the following map declaration and rewrite rule:
#Map to redirect (swaps key and value)
RewriteMap rwmap txt:/home/*/public_html/rdmap.txt
<Directory /home/*/public_html/test>
Options All -Indexes
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^url/([^/]*)/$ /script.php?foo=${rwmap:$1|$1}&rewrite=on [L]
</Directory>
The actual map is a simple text file containing key/value pairs - you need to place this file in the directory declared in RewriteMap rwmap txt:/home/*/public_html/rdmap.txt.
And there you go. Apache now rewrites my URLs for me and I now have some nice and pretty SEO optimized links thanks to my rewrite map! Hoorah!
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^green/([^/]*)/(.*)$ /script.php?somevar=green&nodescription=$1&rewrite=on [L]
This rewrite will allow you to pass "arbitrary text" that has nothing to do with the rewrite. For example:
http://www.mysite.com/green/aA43-/some-seo-boosting-title
Will still reroute correctly to script.php; the latter part will simply be ignored by the rewrite.
I am a newbie to ubuntu and apache. Can someone tell me how I could direct to
www.mysite.com/drupal6
when user address www.mysite.com?
Thanks a lot.
Cheers.
If you are running Apache and Ubuntu, there is actually a really easy way to force this redirect using a simple php script.
Create an index.php file in the root of your server and paste the following code into it
<?php header("location: drupal6/") ?>
This will cause the site to auto-redirect to the drupal6 folder whenever it is visited.
This should work. Create a file in the root folder of your server called .htaccess - the dot at the beginning is very important as this helps the server identify the file as a hidden / system config file.
Open the file and paste the following lines of code in :
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ www.mysite.com/drupal6/$1 [R,L]
This should force all traffic to the server to redirect to your custom folder.
A brief explanation of the .htaccess code
If you want rewrites to work, you have to enable the Rewrite Engine and tell the server to follow symlinks.
The second section establishes the rule - specifically applying it to all traffic on the standard web port of 80.
The final line tells the server to grab everything after the URL and append it to the new address (mysite.com/drupal6).
There's a lot more you can do with .htaccess files but you really need to Google for good examples to test out.
Look at Apache's mod_rewrite documentation. You will need a RewriteRule in your apache configuration at the minimum, you may also need RewriteCond's to define when the RewriteRule is used.
Your rewrite pattern will be rewriting the REQUEST_URI with something from: ^/$ to: /drupal6. The ^ and $ are essential to prevent Apache getting into an infinite loop while rewriting the base URI by only matching "/" and not "/anything-else".
I assume you're on a recent version of Ubuntu and Apache? If so, see the Apache 2.2 documentation on mod_rewrite.