Redirecting Pages: Names to Standard Address - apache

I have WordPress installed in the root of a website, and recently enabled a custom permalink structure just for the sake of having good looking page URLs (only pages are used in this website, no posts at all — it's not a blog). Unfortunately this is causing some problems with other parts of the website, outside WordPress.
So I'd like to go the manual way: and redirect URLs like /my-page to /?page_id=32 just for a selected amount of pages. Is it possible to do that using the .htaccess file? What would the rules look like?

If you're redirecting pages from Wordpress to other URLs, you can use .htaccess. But it's probably easier to use a plugin to redirect rather than edit .htaccess.
See WordPress › Redirection « WordPress Plugins to easily set up redirects and log redirects, errors, and more.

Related

.htaccess rewrite domain but keep directory structure and preserve url in address bar

I have copied a Joomla site from one domain to a new domain.
I want to rewrite the domain name only to keep the directory structure.
And I want to keep the original URL in the address bar to preserve SEO ranking.
Joomla is using relative url's, so the real domain name of the new server will not as such be invoked by Joomla.
How to do this in .htaccess on Apache?
And I want to keep the original URL in the address bar to preserve SEO ranking.
That won't help you really, just add proper 301 redirects and make sure you catch as much of the indexed url's with your redirects component within joomla to prevent any dead links (google hates those and will penalize your domain for it). Also add sitemap, upload it to your google webmaster tools and ask google to index it.

301 rdirect for custom URL

I have a custom made image gallery site that I converted to WordPress, this site have few thousands link like this
http://www.example.net/Gallery?cmd=viewCarGallery&carID=13&pgID=1
http://www.example.net/Gallery?cmd=viewCarGallery&carID=9&pgID=1
All link is now converted to wordpress and now I am facing problem redirect them, I tried to using like this
Redirect 301 /Gallery?cmd=viewCarGallery&carID=9&pgID=1 http://www.example.net/gallery/gallery_ID
Please help me how can I redirect this kind of URL.
A permanent 301 redirect in your .htaccess file lets search engines and others know that an old link has been replaced by a new one. It's the recommended method for directing traffic from an existing page.I added below codes in my .htaccess file.
Redirect 301 /oldfile.htm /newfile.htm
I think what you need is mod rewrite. Take a look here http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/modrewrite-tips-tricks.html
It looks like a similar question https://superuser.com/questions/155139/htaccess-301-redirect-with-regular-expressions

guidelines for htaccess code to transition users to new website

Suppose I have an old website with 10 webpages, and I want to deprecate it and move visitors to a new website with 100 webpages.
Two of the webpages of the old website map directly to two corresponding webpages on the new website. All other pages on the old website should go to the new website's home page. How to set that up?
I know I can use .htaccess in the public_html folder of the old website to create some permanent redirect rules for individual pages. So for the two pages that need to map one-to-one, I can do:
Redirect 301 /oldfile1.htm http://www.example.net/newfile1.htm
Redirect 301 /def/oldfile2.htm http://www.example.net/123/456/newfile2.htm
But what about all the other webpages on the old website? This is where my knowledge of .htaccess lacks. Does the .htaccess stop executing when it reaches one of the redirects above? If so, then perhaps I simply place the following AFTER the above code to catch the remaining pages?
Redirect 301 / http://www.example.net/
Or, something else? Also, will the redirect directly above map all webpages it sees to the home page of the new website (I assume so), or a matching directory/webpage page on the new website? -- That is, I don't want the situation where http://www.olddomain.com/abc/Oldfile1234.html takes users to http://www.example.net/abc/Oldfile1234.html on the new website (rather, it should take users to http://www.example.net) since most webpages do not map one-to-one.
Lastly, in the .htaccess file on the old website public_html directory, how to account for users coming from https versus http, and www versus non-www URLs?
I'm hoping there's common strategy people use for this sort of thing, since it should be fairly common, so I don't have to re-invent one.
You should be using RedirectMatch for precise matching using regular expressions. You can place these rules in root .htaccess:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/oldfile1\.htm$ http://www.example.net/newfile1.htm
RedirectMatch 301 ^/def/oldfile2\.htm$ http://www.example.net/123/456/newfile2.htm
RedirectMatch 301 ^ http://www.example.net/

Single robots.txt file for all subdomains

I have a site (example.com) and have my robots.txt set up in the root directory. I have also multiple subdomains (foo.example.com, bar.example.com, and more to come in the future) whose robots.txt will all be identical as that of example.com. I know that I can place a file at the root of each subdomain but I'm wondering if it's possible to redirect the crawlers searching for robots.txt on any subdomain to example.com/robots.txt?
Sending a redirect header for your robots.txt file is not advised, nor is it officially supported.
Google's documentation specifically states:
Handling of robots.txt redirects to disallowed URLs is undefined and discouraged.
But the documentation does say redirect "will be generally followed". If you add your subdomains into Google Webmaster Tools and go to "Crawl > Blocked URLs" you can test your subdomain robots.txts that are 301 redirecting. It should come back as positively working.
However, with that said, I would strongly suggest that you just symlink the files into place and that each robots.txt file responds with a 200 OK at the appropriate URLs. This is much more inline with the original robots.txt specification, as well as, Google's documentation, and who knows exactly how bing / yahoo will handle it over time.

Multiple Domains to Display Content from Landing Pages on Another Domain

We have created a bunch of landing pages on a Joomla CMS system, such that the URL for each landing page is www.domain.com/page1.html and www.domain.com/page2.html, and so on. Of course the page1.html isn't really an HTML file it is a dynamic CMS page, just rewritten with htaccess.
The goal is to have one of our other domains, something like www.uniquedomain1.com show the content of www.domain.com/page1.html. Or, another domain like www.uniquedomain2.html show the content of www.domain.com/page2.html.
This needs to be search engine friendly so we can't use URL masking. Also we can't use HTACCESS redirects as this actually changes the URL in the browser bar. Need to keep the www.uniquedomain1.com URL in the browser bar.
Tried Apache VirtualHost options without any luck. You can park in a directory but not from a URL.
Ended up parking the domains on one folder, and then creating a PHP script to detect the domain host and then use CURL to query the correct url and deliver content. This whole thing seems ridiculously over complicated, and of course CURL isn't the best option, but it is all we could get to work.
Any thoughts on how to do this, or a better solution?
You can use HTACCESS redirect rules to do it without performing a redirect.
Change the html file names to be the domain name of the desired domain like domain.tld and do something like this in an .htaccess file
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(?:www\.)?([a-z0-9\.-]+\.[a-z]+) [NC]
RewriteRule ^$ /%1.html [L]
A quick test of this worked for two of my test (sub)domains test.domain.tld and test2.domain.tld. Both properly redirected to files with the names test.domain.tld.html and test2.domain.tld.html without modifying the URL.
You could also just use your PHP wrapper script to grab the content of each of the miscellaneous html files and output them.
If you renamed all of your HTML files (as in my previous suggested answer) to be domain.tld.html you could do it fairly easily. Something might look like:
<?php
require($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] .'.html');