Url rewrite for an existing website - apache

I hope this is not a very stupid question. I have to rewrite the url's of an existing website. I have never done that before, so I'm a little bit confused. I have allready written some rules that make a page like faq.php be accessible also by entering only faq without the .php extension, but the page fap.php it's still accessible and in the footer when I move the mouse over the faq icon the link shown in the browser is faq.php. To make the browser display faq and not faq.php do I have to change the href link in the page manually or there is another way?
For example: in this website(stackoverflow) when you move the mouse over questions, tags, users or other links, the browser displays only /questions (or the others) without .php(or whatever they used to built the website). How can I achieve that?

What you see in the status bar is what your server sends to the browser.
To remove .php from faq.php you must either
send only faq (PHP) or
replace the contents of href attributes on the client side (JavaScript).

Related

Google 404 soft error on index page that is working fine

A friend of mine has been having trouble getting her site indexed by google and asked me to have a look, but that is not something I really know much about and was hoping for some assistance.
Looking at her search console, google crawl shows an error of soft-404 on the index page. I marked this as fixed a few times, because the site looks fine to me but it keeps coming back.
If I fetch the site as google it seems to be working fine, although it is showing the mobile version instead of the desktop.
It keeps giving another reoccurring 404 of a page http://www.smeyan.com/new-page, which doesn't exist anywhere I can see including server files or sitemaps.
Here is what I know about this site:
It used to be a wix site and was moved to a host gator shared server 2-3 months ago.
It's using JavaScript/jQuery .load to get page content outside the index.html template.
It has 2 sitemaps one for the URLs and one for both URLs and images
http://www.smeyan.com/sitemap_url.xml http://www.smeyan.com/sitemap.xml
It has been about 2 months since it was submitted for indexing and google has not indexed any of the content when you search for site:www.smeyan.com it shows some old stuff from the wix server. Although search console says it has 172 images indexed.
it has www. as a preference set in search console.
Has anyone experienced this and has an direction for a fix?
How long time was set for this site in Cache-Control header? If long, you should use "google removals" for obsolete snippets and cache. I simulated Google visit on your webpage. Correct 404 return code. Correct headers. Thus. Report google removals for "not found" pages. You must request visit of Googlebot and keep calm and wait for reaction.
BTW: For permanently removed content use 410 Gone for Google or... report via Removals.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en
The only download error that I saw while using Chrome's Inspect function pertains to a SCRIPT tag with a Facebook url as the source (src) file.
This is the error as reported by Inspect.
This is the SCRIPT tag that caused the error.
I am not sure that this is the cause of the reoccurring 404 error, but it is an issue that needs attention on this website.
I checked your site with Tor Browser which has... DISABLED SCRIPTS. You should provide any content on your site with use of <noscript/> tag. It doesn't have to be beautiful but should be visible for bots. <a href... ></a>, <img/> etc. and... TEXT. Without it the site is NOT OPTIMIZED for search bots. Read about SEO. The sitemap content can be never indexed if the content will be never linked.
Probably your webpage also doesn't meet requirements for screen readers (for blind people).
Note: The image with "SMEYAN" caption is visible on webpage and is indexed.
second image on the webpage (in source): <img class="gallery-full-image" src="./galleries/home_gallery/smeyan_home-1.jpg" /> and indexed
The menu also doesn't work without scripts.
I thought the step is good implemented.
Please use <noscript/> element and implement version for blind people (without scripts, provide alt tag for images) and for noscript browsers. You can test it via disabling script or via NOSCRIPT extension for Firefox.
BTW. You should use HTML, CSS (including animations) and... use the JS ONLY if it is needed. Or... <noscript/> method.
Google bot currently use web rendering service (WRS) that is based on old Chrome 41 (M41), so it may fail where browsers succeed.
To learn how google boot works read this.
Add this code to the page to see the real error.
You can see the error using Url Inspector live, from google search console. It will show at more info tab.
Note: if the bot gets a 301 code or if the page is too little to have significant content it will return a soft 404 error, and won't preview or show any other error.

How to Inform Google For Page URL Modifications in Same Domain?

I am renewing my web page and changing the site structure. It was in Asp and now it will be in Asp.Net
So page URLs will be modified. And some pages will be removed, some will be added. But mostly, the content and page names are same, only URLs will change.
The site has SEO work in it and we want to loose it minimum.Site is registered in Analytics and Webmaster Tools.
Google searches will end up blank pages and I don't want to loose my rank.
So I'm looking for a way to inform Google about new page URLs. Domain is same, only URLs. For example: the home page was /default.asp and now /home.aspx
Is there a way to tell Google that a particular URL address or page name has changed?
If all that is changing are the page URLs, Google Analytics cannot "know" that a page is the same, just with diferent URL.
But, you could apply a customized pageview using the _trackPageView() method, giving it the original url as parameter.
If you choose to do this, you will have to exclude the line that uses the method in the original GA code and apply it elsewhere, or pass the parameter to it directly with the orignial URL. All this is done in each page.
You can also read more about the method here.
For IIS (Asp.Net) you want to look into the following to find out how to do 301 redirects:
Response.RedirectPermanent(...) for redirecting from a page
or
"IIS 7 Routing Module and web.config" to set up bulk redirecting
I'd also suggest you consider supporting Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs while your making the move. The Routing Module can help you there as well.
You need to implement some form of 301 (301 is key) redirects. This way when google or any other search hits the old page, the index is refreshed with the new page. Asp.net allows you to do these redirects even at the IIS level, and where I'd suggest that they live. You'll also want to submit an up to date site map on webmaster tools.
Edit: Here's a good link on the redirects, http://www.iis.net/ConfigReference/system.webServer/httpRedirect

default Twitter button doesn't load image

I went to Twitter's resource page here (https://twitter.com/about/resources/tweetbutton) and got the following code:
Tweet<script type="text/javascript" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
When I put this in my Wordpress template, I don't get the Twitter button -- I just get the text "Tweet". However, when I change the src for widgets.js to include https:// or http:// at the beginning it works.
Could it be that it's just an error that they forgot the protocol? Also, do you think it is better to use https (for consistency with the share link) versus http, or does it not matter?
Thanks for your suggestions.
The URL "//example.com/script.js" tells the browser to open the URL using the protocol of the current page, which is likely to be "file://" if your browser opened an html file on your own machine. Of course, you don't have a file called "file://example.com/script.js" on your computer.
In the past, urls for embedded widgets used to include the protocol (http or https), but a site visitor would receive warnings whenever a secure page loaded a script from an insecure page, and sometimes even vice versa. Now, widgets from Twitter, Google Analytics, and other sites no longer specify the protocol so that the same embed code can work on any page on the internet. The downside is that this does not work when you embed such a widget into a file and view it on your own browser by double-clicking it!

Special redirect by htaccess

I have a menu in Flash without access to it's links. One of the items leads to this link: http://dev.infinityfitness.pl/rozklad, but the domain is not mine.
Is it possible to override this link using htaccess that if user clicks in this menu item the redirect leads him to something like this http://infinityfit.dnawrot.nazwa.pl/rozklad?
The .htaccess file would need to reside on the domain you don't have access to, unfortunately.
It's not possible to "intercept" client side links inside of a flash app if you don't have access to the source code.

why are some pages in my start directory not showing in my site map?

If i generate a site map at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/, for aromapersona.com, I get 9 pages, however there are a bunch more pages that should show up. For example, aromapersona.com/candle_holder is in the same "front" directory as the other 9 pages, but doesnt generate in sitemap. Is this because no other pages on my site link to it? Im trying to get these other URLs indexed, and I even edited the site map to include this URL as well as others and submitted to google via webmaster tools, and still nothing. Advice?
I'm not familiar with aromapersona.com but it will only be able to list pages that are linked to from the initial page you give it (or ones they link to) unless you provide the site with FTP access (which I presume you dont).
If you include the URL's in your sitemap for goggle it should eventually list them, but linking to them from other parts of your site is probably the most effective.
I have not checked the website, but do also take the cause is not because of noindex, nofollow, robots.txt, javascript links, mixing http/https etc.
In clear wording: There is no link pointing to the subpage "candle_holder", hence the XML site generator (which works by following links on your site) cannot detect it.
You can add it manually to the XML, but then again, it should be accessible from the site directly.