I'm on the learning curve for 301 redirects and have done lots of research, including looking at answers on this forum. I haven't found the answer to my specific query, which requires removing elements from the middle of the url request.
Namely, I am building a new site with dynamic links (WordPress, but the question applies to any CMS).
I need to redirect from links (also dynamic) structured as:
sitename.com/issue/february-2016/post/dynamic-post-name
(february-2016 is an example - could be 'march-2014' or any of a range of terms)
to:
sitename.com/post/dynamic-post-name
Another way to say this: Any request url with /article/ needs to grab that last string (which I think would be the wildcard?) and redirect it as: sitename.com/post/$
Is this possible?
Update: With more research, I found a possible answer that worked in a testing tool, although I've not tested it live on my site.
Does this look correct?
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/article/([^.]+)$ article/$3 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^article/.*/(.*)$ post/$1 [QSA,L,R=301]
Something like this should work.
The characters captured within the brackets (.*) will be the $1.
Feel free to change article and post to fit your need.
In this case, it will redirect
http://example.com/article/february-2016/post/dynamic-post-name
to
http://example.com/post/dynamic-post-name
Related
Friends, this is a complex problem for me. I have researched on this many times and at last have came to you (with hope that I will get the solution). We had products URLs like:
/product_info.php/products_id/75
As per SEO, I wanted keyword rich URL so, we added a slug in products.php file and modified the URL as:
/product_info.php/products_id/75/product-title
But its also not an ideal URL. I wanted this as:
domainname.com/products/product-title/75
Changes I made in .htaccess file is as follows-
RewriteRule ^products/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/([0-9]{2})/?$ product_info.php?products_id=$2=$1 [L]
RedirectMatch 301 ^/product_info.php/products_id/([0-9]{2})/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)$ http://www.livevaastu.com/products/$2/$1
Now problem is- our old URLs (which has no slugs) are indexed by Google. And I am not getting any idea how to redirect those old ones to new ones. Also there are many products pages so I couldn't redirect them one-by-one. You guys are genius. Can you help me any how. (without laughing on me). M not a developer.
You can't produce product_info.php?products_id=$2=$1 from your old URLs of /product_info.php/products_id/75 because they don't have the product title ("slug").
For one thing product_info.php?products_id=$2=$1 doesn't make any sense. Is that a typo? What are the key/value pairs in that query string?? This should look something like products_id=$1&product_title=$2 where each derived "value" from the mod_rewrite match gets assigned to a known "key", something you can use in $_GET or $_REQUEST to find the value.
Edit to help with what I think you are trying to achieve here, based on discussion:
If you want your old URLs to lead to the new "pretty" URLs, you will need to use PHP to do this. As mentioned, there simply is not adequate information in the URL to invent the product names. But you could pretty easily have something at the top of each page (i.e. in a header file) which looked to see if the "title" $_GET parameter is present or not (once you clean up the double-equal sign and replace it with proper key/value pairs). This might look something like:
<?php
if( !isset( $_GET['product_title'] ) ) {
// Code here to look up $product_title from the $product_id, presumably in a DB
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: /products/$product_title/$product_id");
exit();
}
I want to get a URL scheme exact like SO's question URL.
Like http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6035363/so-like-url-with-mod-rewrite
this page can be accessed with http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6035363
but then it redirects to the http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6035363/so-like-url-with-mod-rewrite
I need to do the same.
My page will be in the root directory named article.php
the url will be like
article.php?id=1&title=some_text
i want it to be accessed with [any of these will do]
acticle.php/id/1/some_text
or
acticle/id/1/some_text
or
acticle/id/1&title=some_text
[Sorry i really dont know about mod_rewrite so i read some question and googled some cheat sheets but none of them worked :(
So looking for some copy-paste solution]
It's best if you divide and conquer the URL to reverse engineer it.
So a few key points:
6035363 is the important part of the URL as it's the question ID.
Everything else is arbitrary SEO, friendly URLs
Having multiple URLs of the same page will hurt SEO, so stick to one URL format
With that said, article/id/some_keyword_text is the format I suggest. The following RewriteRules will handle it.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^article/(\d+)/?$ test/article.php?id=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^article/(\d+)/([\w-]+)/?$ test/article.php?id=$1&title=$2 [L]
The first rule redirects article/id with an optional trailing slash. The second rule redirects article/id/some_keyword_text with an optional trailing slash. some_keyword_text may only contain alphanumeric, underscore, or dash characters.
Note: The redirection for URLs of format article/id happens at the page level. So this is not a RewriteRule, but logic in the page that redirects when title is not set. I'm guessing a 301 Redirect to ensure point #3.
I need to grab some of my website's old URLs and do a 301 redirect to the new ones, since they are already indexed and we don't want to loose relevance after the change. The old URL is in fact very ugly and for some reason everything I try to do to rewrite it does not work. Here it is:
http://www.mywebsite.com/ExibeCurso.asp?Comando=TreinamentoGeral&codCurso=136&Titulo=Como%20Estruturar%20um%20Sistema%20Gerencial%20de%20Controles%20Organizacionais,13
Basically, I need to translate it into something like:
http://www.mywebsite.com/curso/136
From the old URL I need to check if the user typed "ExibeCurso.asp"; then I know I must send him here: /curso. I must also grab the integer that was in the querystring parameter "codCurso" (136). What is the regular expression I must use for this. I am using ISAPI_Rewrite 3, which basically implements htaccess on IIS, so there should be no difference in terms of syntax. Thanks.
Try this rule:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^([^&]*&)*codCurso=([0-9]+)(&.*)?$
RewriteRule ^/ExibeCurso\.asp$ /curso/%2? [L,R=301]
But I’m not sure whether ISAPI Rewrite requires the pattern to begin with a slash.
Off the top of my head, something like this should work:
RewriteRule ^ExibeCurso.asp(.*)$ http://www.mywebsite.com/curso/$1 [L,R=301]
That would at least send the traffic to /curso/ with all parameters attached. Maybe it's best to process it from there.
One of our website has URL like this : example.oursite.com. We decided to move our site with an URL like this www.oursite.com/example. To do this, we wrote a rewrite rule in our Apache server that redirect to our new URL with a code 301.
Many websites link to us with URLs of the form example.oursite.com/#id=23. The problem is that the redirection erase the hash part of the URL with IE. As far as I know, the hash part is never sent to the server.
I wanted to implement the redirection with javascript to keep the hash part, but the Search Engine will not be aware that our URL changed. (no code 301 returned)
I want the Search Engine to be notified of our new URL(301) because we need to transfer the page rank to our new URL.
Is there a way to redirect with a 301 code and keep the hash part(#id=23) of in the URL ?
Search engines do in fact care about hash tags, they frequently use them to highlight specific content on a page.
To the question, however, anchor locations are unfortunately not sent to the server as part of the HTTP request. If you want to redirect a user, you will need to do this in Javascript on the client side.
Good article: http://web.archive.org/web/20090508005814/http://www.mikeduncan.com/named-anchors-are-not-sent/
Seeing as the server will never see the # (ruling out 301 Redirects) and Google has deprecated their AJAX Crawling scheme, it seems that a front-end solution is the only way!
How I did it:
(function() {
var redirects = [
['#!/about', '/about'],
['#!/contact', '/contact'],
['#!/page-x', '/pageX']
]
for (var i=0; i<redirects.length; i++) {
if (window.location.hash == redirects[i][0]) {
window.location.replace(redirects[i][1]);
}
}
})();
I'm assuming that because Google crawlers do indeed execute Javascript, the new pages will be indexed properly.
I've put it in a <script> tag directly underneath the <title> tag, so that it get executed before any other JS/CSS. Note that this script should only be required for your index file.
I am fairly certain that the hash/page anchor/bookmark part of a URL is not indexed by search engines, and therefore has no effect on your page ranking. Doing a google search for "inurl:#" returns zero documents, so that backs up my assumption. Links from external sites will be indexed without the hash.
You are right in that the hash part isn't sent to the server, so as far as I am aware, there isn't a good way to be able to create a redirection url with the hash in it.
Because of this, it's up to the browser to correctly manage the hash during a redirect. Firefox 3.5 appears to do this successfully. If you append a hash to a URL that has a known redirect, you will see the URL change in the address bar to the new location, but the hash stays on there successfully.
Edit: In response to the comment below, if there isn't a hash sign in the external URL for the part you need, then it is entirely possible to rewrite the URL. An Apache rewrite rule would take care of it:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^exemple\.oursite\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://www.oursite.com/exemple/$1 [L,R]
If you're not using Apache, then you'll have to look into the server docs for something similar.
Google has a special syntax for AJAX applications that is based on hash URLs: http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html
You could create a page on the old address that catches all requests and redirects to the new site with the correct address and code.
I did something like that, but it was in asp.net, which I guess it's not the language you use. Anyway there should be a way to do this in any language.
When returning status 301, your server is supposed to return a 'Location:' header which points to the new location. In practice, the way this is implemented varies; some servers provide the full URL (netloc and path), some just provide the new path and expect the browser to look for that path on the original netloc. It sounds like your rewrite rule is stripping the path.
An easy way to see what the returned Location header is, in the python shell:
>>> import httplib
>>> conn = httplib.HTTPConnection('exemple.oursite.com')
>>> conn.request('HEAD', '/')
>>> res = conn.getresponse()
>>> print res.getheader('location')
I'm afraid I don't know enough about mod_rewrite to tell you how to do the rewrite rule correctly, but this should give you an idea of what your server is actually telling clients to do.
The search bots don't care about hash tags. And if you are using them for some kind of flash or AJAX calls, you have more serious problems than your 301 redirects don't work. Because unless you have the content in an alternate form, the search engines are not indexing your site and you are definitely suffering as far as SEO goes.
I registered my account so I can't edit.
zombat : I'm sorry I made a mistake in my comment. The link to our video is exemple.oursite.com/#video_id=233. In this case, my rewrite rule in Apache doesn't work.
Nick Berardi: We changed the way our links work. We don't use # anymore, only for backward compatibility
It's of course nice to give users friendly URLs for their content on your site. But how best to do that? There are a lot of advantages to something like foo.com/users/alice, most importantly that you aren't cluttering up your root namespace. But I think simplicity for users trumps all that. A lot of big sites seem to agree (friendfeed, delicious, and flickr come to mind) and this question is about how to accomplish that on the server side.
Let's assume the real URL for alice is foo.com/userpage?user=alice and that if someone tries to surf to a nonexistent user page (let's say foo.com/bob) they should reach foo.com/createnew?user=bob.
The user of course should never see the ugly "real" URLs above, just foo.com/alice or foo.com/bob. And note that the root namespace is shared. For example, foo.com/help should not get translated to foo.com/userpage?user=help.
Presumably I'm asking for some simple mod_rewrite rules, but perhaps there's some completely different approach to this that I'm not thinking of. In any case, I thought it would be good to record a definitive or "best practice" solution to this common question.
PS: Feel free to comment on the merits of other alternatives like alice.foo.com or users.foo.com/alice.
PPS: I think I've seen this issue debated in other questions but it seems to be tricky to search for. Pointers welcome! As well as additional keywords to make this more searchable, of course. Keywords: userspace, global namespace, URL namespace.
I would say it depends on how user centred your site is.
Sites like myspace are http://www.myspace.com/jim/ because the site entirely revolves around the user.
A blog or news site, however, where you can register but it isn't important or mandatory could benefit from
http://www.news.com.au/users/jim/
Do you think if you're doing a website with users you could benefit from the MVC design pattern, or at least a popular MVC framework which uses a router to direct URIs?
If that URI came through a Router, and then was sent to the UsersController, you could decide to either show the user's profile, or direct them to create that user. You would not need to mess around with mod_rewrite except to make one rule that directs all requests to non existent files to index.php (or whatever the default of your server side language is)
If you do want to use mod_rewrite, try these rules
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(home|contact|about) [NC] // this line may be incorrect
RewriteRule ^/users/([^/]+)/?$ userpage?user=$1 [NC,L]
Please note the leading Carat as suggested by Gumbo, so it only matches /users/ of the TLD only.
That will match anything like foo.com/users/bob with an optional trailing slash. It is case insensitive and will be the last rule applied.
If the request comes in and the $_GET['user'] does not exist in your DB, you could try something like this
$user = $_GET['user'];
if (!user_exists($user)) {
header('Location: createnew?user=' . urlencode($user));
exit();
}
Then on the createnew page, simply do something like this
<input type="text" name="username" value="<?php echo htmlspecialchars(urldecode($_GET['user'])); ?>" />
That will fill in the username automatically with the username they tried to access a profile with.
If you'd like to know more about PHP and MVC, try a Google search or ask a question here on Stack Overflow.
The following rules rewrite a URL of the form foo.com/bar to foo.com/userpage?user=bar conditional on bar not already being a file or directory on the server. Put the following in .htaccess:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/?$ userpage?user=$1 [NC,L]
</IfModule>
As in Alex's answer, the userpage script should redirect to createnew if the user doesn't exist:
$user = $_GET['user'];
if (!user_exists($user)) {
header('Location: createnew?user=' . urlencode($user));
}
(As Knuth says, beware of bugs in the above code -- I have only proved it correct, not tried it. I'll update this answer when I've actually confirmed it works.) PS: CONFIRMED!