It looks as though this question has been asked in part by some others, but I can't find the answer I'm looking for specifically, so I thought I'd pose my particular scenario in case anyone is able to help.
We have an old website (developed externally by a third party) that is due to be retired and replaced by a new site designed in house. For reasons best known to themselves, the developers of the old site used the hash character as part of the URL for the old site (www.mysite.com/#/my-content-stuff). To assist with the transition and help with SEO I need to set up 301 redirects for the top performing URLs from the old site. As I'm now discovering however, I'm not able to set up a simple redirect in the .htaccess file as I believe it takes the hash character to be a comment and ignores the remainder of the line. I've tried escape characters, using %23 instead, wildcard matching, nothing seems to work.
As a workaround, I wondered about simply creating dummy files with the same paths and URLs as the old site had, then simply creating HTML redirects within them to drive traffic to the correct new pages, but it looks as though the server is doing something similar regarding the hash character in the URL, and ignoring anything afterit. So, if I create a sub-folder on my news server called '#' and create a file in there called 'test.html', I expected to be able to just go to 'www.myNEWsite.com/#/test.html', but it just takes me to the default root file of my site.
Please can anyone shed any light on how I might get around this? I must admit I'm not that clued up on Apache so I'm having to learn a lot as I go.
Many thanks in advance for any pointers or info anyone can provide.
Cheers,
Rich
A hash character in the URL specifies the anchor, and it's not even sent to your webserver. A redirect is impossible on the server side, and the old developer probably did it using JavaScript. Implement fallback URLs without the hash instead, and have a global JavaScript script detect these URLs and redirect automatically.
Hash tags cannot be read by the server. They are regarded as locations within the document and are therefore not exposed to the server. The client is the only one whom see's these. The best you could do is use a "meta refresh" tag, or alternatively, you could use javascript to detect the url, and if its one which requires 301 redirection, use "window.location" to move the user to a full url where mod_rewrite or a php page can issue a 301 header.
However neither are SEO friendly and only really solve the issue for users that click onto an old link via an external site
<!-- Put in head tag so the page does not wait to load the content-->
<script type="text/javascript">
if(window.location.hash != "") {
var h = window.location.hash.match(/#\/?(.*)/i)[1];
switch(h) {
case "something_old":
window.location = "/something_new.html";
break;
case "something_also_old":
window.location = "/something_also_new.html";
break;
}
}
</script>
Related
(Hi! This is my first time asking a question on Stack Overflow after years of finding answers here... Thanks!)
I have a dynamic page, and I'd like to have fixed URLs that point to different states of that page. So, for example: "www.mypage.co"(/index.php) is the base page, and it rearranges its content based on user choices. I'd then like to be able to point to "www.mypage.co/contentA" or "www.mypage.co/contentB" in order to automatically load base the page at "www.mypage.co" with the desired content.
At heart the problem is an aesthetic one. I know I could simply write www.mypage.co/index.html?state=contentA to reach the desired end, but I want to keep the URL simple and readable (ie, clean). I also, due to limitations in my hosting relationship, would most appreciate a solution that is server-independent (across LAM[PHP] stacks, at least), if possible.
Also, if I just have incorrect assumptions about how to implement clean URLs, I'd appreciate direction to a good, comprehensive explanation. I can't seem to find one...
You could use a htaccess file to redirect all requests to one location and then from there determine what you want to return to the client. Look over the htaccess/dispatch system that Tonic uses.
If you use Apache, you can use mod_rewrite. I have a rule like this where multiple restful urls all go to the same page, using regex and moving parts of the old url into parameters for the new url:
RewriteRule ^/testapp/(name|number|rn|sid|unii|inchikey|formula)(/(startswith))?/?(.*) /testapp/ProxyServlet?objectHandle=Search&actionHandle=drillIn&searchtype=$1&searchterm=$4&startswith=$3 [NC,PT]
That particular regex accepts urls like
testapp/name
testapp/name/zuchini
testapp/name/startswith/zuchini
and forwards them to the same page.
I also use UrlRewriteFilter for Tomcat, but as you mentioned PHP, that doesn't seem that it would be useful.
I understand the og:url meta tag is the canonical url for the resource in the open graph.
What strategies can I use if I wish to support 301 redirecting of the resource, while preserving its place in the open graph? I don't want to lose my likes because i've changed the URLs.
Is the best way to do this to store the original url of the content, and refer to that? Are there any other strategies for dealing with this?
To clarify - I have page:
/page1, with an og:url of http://www.example.com/page1
I now want to move it to
/page2, using a 301 redirect to http://www.example.com/page2
Do I have any options to avoid losing the likes and comments other than setting the og:url meta to /page1?
Short answer, you can't.
Once the object has been created on Facebook's side its URL in Facebook's graph is fixed - the Likes and Comments are associated with that URL and object; you need that URL to be accessible by Facebook's crawler in order to maintain that object in the future. (note that the object becoming inaccessible doesn't necessarily remove it from Facebook, but effectively you'd be starting over)
What I usually recommend here is (with examples http://www.example.com/oldurl and http://www.example.com/newurl):
On /newpage, keep the og:url tag pointing to /oldurl
Add a HTTP 301 redirect from /oldurl to /newurl
Exempt the Facebook crawler from this redirect
Continue to serve the meta tags for the page on http://www.example.com/oldurl if the request comes from the Facebook crawler.
No need to return any actual content to the crawler, just a simple HTML page with the appropriate tags
Thus:
Existing instances of the object on Facebook will, when clicked, bring users to the correct (new) page via your redirect
The Like button on the (new) page will still produce a like of the correct object (but at the old URL)
If you're moving a lot of URLs around or completely rewriting your URL scheme you should use the new URLs for new articles/products/etc, but you'll need to keep the redirect in place if you want to retain likes, comments, etc on the older content.
This includes if you're changing domain.
The only problem here is maintaining the old URL -> new URL mapping somewhere in your code, but it's not technically difficult, just an additional thing to maintain in the future.
BTW, The Facebook crawler UA is currently facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)
I'm having the same problem with my old sites. Domains are changing, admins want to change urls for seo etc
I came to conclusion its best to have some sort uniqe id in db just for facebook - from the beginning. For articles for example I have myurl.com/a/123 where 123 is ID of the article.
Real url is myurl.com/category/article-title. Article can then be put in different category, renamed etc with extensive logic for 301 redirects behind it. But the basic fb identifier can stay the same for ever.
Of course this is viable only when starting with a fresh site or when implementing fb comments for the first time.
Just an idea if you can plan ahead :) Let me know what you think.
I'm using pretty URLs in my web app, one example is 'forum/post/1' which invokes PostController in Forum module, which loads a post with id=1. This is what I need but that post is also accessible from 'forum/post/view/id/1'. That's bad, because search crawlers don't like when same page is accessible from several URLs, right?
I'm using Yii framework which supports 'useStrictParsing' option, which tells that incoming request must match at least one "pretty" route, otherwise request fails with 404. However it's not a perfect solution, because I don't have pretty URLs for every controller/action.
Ideally, framework should redirect 'forum/post/view/id/1' to 'forum/post/1' with a 301 status code. How did you solve this problem? It's not Yii/PHP specific question, how does your framework/tool deal with it?
The best way to make sure search engines only rank one page the pretty url over another, if there are multiple ways to view the content is to your a canonical tag within the header of your document
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com/nice-url/" />
This is very useful with windows based system as IIS is not case sensitive with its web pages but the web standard is case sensitive.
So
www.maydomain.com/Newpage.aspx
www.maydomain.com/newpage.aspx
www.maydomain.com/NEWPAGE.aspx
These are all seen by Google as different pages, and you are then marked down for having a site with duplicate content, but not so with a canonical as each page in the case above would have the same canonical meta tag and the that url is the only one which will be used by the search engines.
Provided that no one links to your non-pretty urls, the search engines will never know that they exist.
If you do want to eliminate them, you could bypass your web framework by adding an alias in you web server's configuration file; the url will be redirected before it ever reaches the framework.
Frameworks like Django, which don't provide 'magic' routing, don't face this issue, the only routes which exist are those which you define manually. In it's case, you could define a view for the non-pretty url which returns the appropriate redirect.
Couple of months ago, we revamped our web site. We adopted totally new site structure, specifically merged several pages into one. Everything looks charming.
However, there are lots of dead links which produce a large number of 404 errors.
So how can I do with it? If I leave it alone, could it bite back someday, say eating up my pr?
One basic option is using 301 redirect, however it is almost impossible considering the number of it.
So is there any workaround? Thanks for your considering!
301 is an excellent idea.
Consider you can take advantage of global configurations to map a group of pages. You don't necessary need to write one redirect for every 404.
For example, if you removed the http://example/foo folder, using Apache you can write the following configuration
RedirectMatch 301 ^/foo/(.*)$ http://example.org/
to catch all 404 generated from the removed folder.
Also, consider to redirect selectively. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to check which 404 URI are receiving the highest number inbound links and create a redirect configuration only for those.
Chances are the number of redirection rules you need to create will decrease drastically.
301 is definitely the correct route to go down to preserve your page rank.
Alternatively, you could catch 404 errors and redirect either to a "This content has moved" type page, or your home page. If you do this I would still recommend cherry picking busy pages and important content and setting up 301s for these - then you can preserve PR on your most important content, and deal gracefully with the rest of the dead links...
I agree with the other posts - using mod_rewrite you can remap URLs and return 301s. Note - it's possible to call an external program or database with mod_rewrite - so there's a lot you can do there.
If your new and old site don't follow any remapable pattern, then I suggest you make your 404 page as useful as possible. Google has a widget which will suggest the page the user is probably looking for. This works well once Google has spidered your new site.
Along with the other 301 suggestions, you could also split the requested url string into a search string routing to your default search page (if you have one) passing those parameters automatically to the search.
For example, if someone tries to visit http://example.com/2009/01/new-years-was-a-blast, this would route to your search page and automatically search for "new years was a blast" returning the best result for those key words and hopefully your most relevant article.
With ASP.NET MVC (or using HttpHandlers) you can dynamically generate URLs, like the one in this question, which includes the title.
What happens if the title changes (for example, editing it) and there's a link pointing to the page from another site, or Google's Pagerank was calculated for that URL?
I guess it's all lost right? (The link points to nowhere and the pagerank calculated is lost)
If so, is there a way to avoid it?
I use the same system as is in place here, everything after the number in the URL is not used in the db query, then I 301 redirect anything else to be the title.
In other words, if the title changed, then it would redirect to the correct place. I do it in PHP rather than htaccess as it's easier to manage more complex ideas.
I think you're generally best off having the server send a permanent redirect to the new location, if possible.
That way any rank which is gained from third party links should, in theory, be transferred to the new location. I'm not convinced whether this happens in practice, but it should.
The way Stackoverflow seems to be implemented everything after the question number is superfluous as far as linking to the question goes. For instance:
SEO and hard links with dynamic URLs
links to this question, despite the fact that I just made up the 'question title' part out of thin air. So the link will not point to nowhere and the PageRank is not lost (though it may be split between the two URLs, depending on whether or not Google can canonicalize them into a single URL).
Have your app redirect the old URL via a 301 Redirect. This will tell Google to transfer the pagerank to the new URL.
If a document is moved to a different URL, the server should be configured to return a HTTP status code of 301 (Moved Permanently) for the old URL to tell the client where the document has been moved to. With Apache, this is done using mod_rewrite and RewriteRule.
The best thing to help Google in this instance is to return a permanent redirect on the old URL to the new one.
I'm not an ASP.NET hacker - so I can't recommend the best way to implement this - but Googling the topic looks fairly productive :-)
Yes, all SEO is lost upon a url change -- it forks to an entirely new record. The way to handle that is to leave a 301 redirect at the old title to the new one, and some search engines (read: Google) is smart enough to pick that up.
EDIT: Fixed to 301 redirect!