Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
URL rewriting from subcategory to category
-
Hello everybody!
I have quite simple question about URL rewriting from subcategory to category, yet I can't find any solution to this problem (due to lack of my deeper apache programming knowledge).
Here is my problem/question:
we have two website url structures that causes dublicate problems:
1 and 2 pages are absolutely same (both also returns 200 OK). What we need is 301 redirect from 2 to 1 without any other deeper categories redirects (like www.website.com/language/category/1/169/ redirecting to .../category/1/ or .../category/).
Here goes .htaccess URL rewrite rules:
RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&par4=$6&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/$ /index.php?lang=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
There are other redirects that handles non-www to www and related issues:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/lt/$ http://www.domain.lt/
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.lt
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.lt/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.domain.lt/$1/ [R=301,L]
At this moment we cannot solve this problem with rel canonical (due to our CMS limits).
Thanks for your help guys!
If You need any other details on our coding, just let me know.
-
That's great!
Glad to help anytime. Sha
-
Thank You very much! The code You provided worked very well and solved our problem.
-
Thanks Alan Mosley and Sha Menz! We will try to implement given advices tonight (at low traffic hours) and check back soon with results. Sha, thats ok with line breaks, we will figure it out. Thanks for your support once again!
-
Sorry that my answer appears to have lost all line breaks...seems to be some css issues at the moment.
Hoping you can copy it out and separate the lines ....I will try to reformat it as soon as I can, but right now it just keeps loading funky.
Sha
-
Hi kundrotas, The problem you have is that the code used for .htaccess functions is not terribly "intelligent". It does not allow for the use of "IF" statements etc. This being the case, the better option is to move the action to within the actual code. This is the rule at question RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] The easiest thing to do is in index.php add a check for par1 // If par1 is 1 and everything else is blank send it to the root. if( $par1 == '1' && $par2 == '' && $par3 == '' && $par4 == '' && $par5 == '' && $par6 == '' ) { $location = "/$lang/$idr/"; header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently'); header ('Location: '.$location); } Hope that helps, Sha
-
in windows on a IIS server it would be
<match url="^category/1$"><action type="Rewrite" url="category"></action></match>
i think in a htaccess file it would be sothing like
RewriteRule ="^/category/1$ http://www.domain.lt/category [R=301,L]
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
URL has caps, but canonical does not. Now what?
Hi, Just started working with a site that has the occasional url with a capital, but then the url in the canonical as lower case. Neither, when entered in a browser, resolves to the other. It's a Shopify site. What do you think I should do?
Technical SEO | | 945010 -
WooCommerce category naming conventions
I am managing a woocommerce store selling prescription glasses/spectacles. We have a lot of categories with similar names and I want to adopt the best possible naming convention to get the best from search. So we have a number of similar categories for both Men's and women's glasses. Currently they are named as follows: Women's Glasses-Women's Rimless Glasses
Technical SEO | | SushiUK
-Women's Semi Rimless Glasses
-Women's Plastic Glasses
-Women's Metal Glasses
-Women's Retro Glasses Currently, this results in the following URL structure for sub categories: https://www.glassesonspec.co.uk/product-category/womens-glasses-2/womens-rimless-glasses/ (For some reason WooCommerce is adding -2 to the end of the primary category name, it will not let me change it for some reason, this is the subject of a further investigation!) So first question, is there too much duplication of the word glasses on the sub items? for example, should they read; Women's Glasses
-Rimless
-Semi Rimless
-Plastic
-Metal
-Retro Hence giving this URL structure: https://www.glassesonspec.co.uk/product-category/womens-glasses-2/rimless/ OR, should we change the top level category name to just Women's and let the sub categories complete the picture?: Women's
-Rimless Glasses
-Semi Rimless Glasses
-Plastic Glasses
-Metal Glasses
-Retro Glasses Giving this example URL structure: https://www.xxxxxxxxxxxxx.co.uk/product-category/womens/rimless-glasses/ This would solve my hyphenation problem, however my fear is the top level category on it's own is not descriptive enough when viewed as stand alone: https://www.xxxxxxxxxxxxx.co.uk/product-category/womens/ The second part of my question relates to how to deal with the change in URL structure. I am using Yoast Premium, so will that pick up the changes and automatically redirect to the new one as it does when done manually? Or will I need to take a different approach using HTACCESS commands? I hope the above makes sense, Many thanks, Bob0 -
Spaces (actual spaces) in URL
Hi all, Is there a huge loss of SEO performance if a URL shows spaces with an actual space (i.e. %20) in the URL rather than a "-" (or indeed a "_")? I know the preferred option is to have a "-", but I am just wondering if it is worth our effort to manually change the "%20" to a "-" in all the instances? Thanks 🙂 Diana
Technical SEO | | Diana.varbanescu0 -
Removing Redirected URLs from XML Sitemap
If I'm updating a URL and 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL, Google recommends I remove the old URL from our XML sitemap and add the new URL. That makes sense. However, can anyone speak to how Google transfers the ranking value (link value) from the old URL to the new URL? My suspicion is this happens outside the sitemap. If Google already has the old URL indexed, the next time it crawls that URL, Googlebot discovers the 301 redirect and that starts the process of URL value transfer. I guess my question revolves around whether removing the old URL (or the timing of the removal) from the sitemap can impact Googlebot's transfer of the old URL value to the new URL.
Technical SEO | | RyanOD0 -
What is the best URL designed for a product page?
Should a product page URL include the category name and subcategory name in it? Most ecommerce platforms it seems are designed to do have the category and sub-category names included in the URL followed by the product name. If that is the case and the same product is listed in more then 1 category and sub-category then will that product have 2 unique urls and as a result be treated as 2 different product pages by google? And then since it is the same product in two places on the site won't google treat those 2 pages as having duplicate content? SO is it best to not have the category and sub-category names in the URL of a product page? And lastly, is there a preferred character limit for a URL to be less than in size? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | gallreddy0 -
Old URL redirect to New URL
Alright I did something dumb a year a go and I'm still paying for it. I changed my hyphenated URL to the non-hyphenated version when I redesigned my website. I say it was dumb because I lost most of my link juice even though I did 301 redirects (via the htaccess file) for almost all of the pages I could find in Google's index. Here's my problem. My new site took a huge hit in traffic (down 60%) when I made the change and even though I've done thousands of redirects my old site is still showing up in the SERPS and send much if not most of my traffic. I don't want to take the old site down in fear it will kill all of my traffic. What should I do? Is there a better method I should explore then 301 redirects? Could the other site be affecting my current rank since it's still there? (FYI...both sites are built on the WP platform). Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. Thank you! Joe
Technical SEO | | kaje0 -
Cyrillic letter in URL - Encoding
Hi all We are launching our site in Russia. As far as I can see by searching Google all sites have URLs in latin letters. Is there a special reason for this? - It seems that cyrillic letters also work. My technical staff says that it might give some encoding problems. Can anyone give me some insight into this? Thanks in advance.. / Kenneth
Technical SEO | | Kennethskonto0 -
How do I get Google to display categories instead of the URL in results?
I've seen that for some domains Google will show a nice clickable site heirarchy in place of the actual URL of a search result. See attached for an example. How do I go about achieving this type of results? categorized.png
Technical SEO | | Carlito-2569610