Urls rewriting "how to" with .htaccess
-
hi,
Please i would need advices (links, tips, tool:generator ?) regarding url rewriting through .htaccess (newbee about it).
It's a "refurbishing" website case , the domain doesn't change. But the CMS does !
I've got a list of urls (800) with which i don't want to loose rankings on :
Here the type of old url syntax :
http://www.mydomain.com/home/newscontent.asp?id=1133
Here the new url type would be:
http://www.mydomain.com/name-of-the-article
or/and
http://www.mydomain.com/category/Page-2Tks a lot...
-
You should get all the url of the old site with Xenu's Link Sleuth, then create a PHP array of oldUrl => newUrl and put it in your redirect script.
So you have in the htaccess :
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/home/newscontent.asp
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} id=([0-9]+)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ redirect.php?id=%1 [L]In the redirect.php file, you have :
$redirect = array("/home/newscontent.asp?id=1133" => "/name-of-the-article"); // 800 times (for all url)
if(isset($redirect[$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']])) {
header("Status: 301 Moved Permanently", false, 301);
header("Location: http://www.mydomain.com/".$redirect[$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']]);
exit();
}// Send a 404 if you don't have a redirect
-
Hi, i was thinking of the whole picture of baptiste solution, you say :
"Baptiste: On the new linux hosting set up an .htaccess file in the root of the site directory that redirects all id=xxxx requests to a redirect.php file on your server. The redirect.php file will need to interrogate a database with a table of the mappings and automatically redirect to the correct page via php scripting."
it means that wiithout any credentials, any database access, if you have urls from the site you need to move to, you can redirect any urls site to another one !?
Hum..i think i miss something ..
-
Good idea..i'll to make it so , and use excel function.....tks
-
Many tks for all these explanations..
So, in fact, lazily speaking, i would say that the .htaccess file solution give less work to do (no redirection script) and seems to be quite easy to make (excepting syntax inside .htaccess), so i 'll go for Damien's ..but i need credentials to install it.
Otherwise, if i don't, I'd go for Baptiste's...
Tks a lot...
-
As you have only 800 urls, I agree with Damien, you should generate an associative array in pure php, associating every ID with the new url.
The redirect script will only test if the ID is an array key, if it is you 301 to the new url. Otherwise, display a 404 page.
-
OK in that case it simplifies things a bit.
In order to do any redirection from id=1136 to unique-article-name you will haveto create the mappings entirely manually.
The two solutions provided are:
Baptiste: On the new linux hosting set up an .htaccess file in the root of the site directory that redirects all id=xxxx requests to a redirect.php file on your server. The redirect.php file will need to interrogate a database with a table of the mappings and automatically redirect to the correct page via php scripting.Mine: essentially the same as Baptiste's proposal, except that you don't interrogate the database, all the redirections are done using the htaccess file which contains all the mappings.
Either way you will need to manually create the mappings yourself, either in the database or in the htaccess file.
EDIT: Just had a thought, are the page titles of the articles the same between the new site and the old? If they are then you could crawl both sites with Xenu and then use vlookups in excel (or similar) to semi-automatically create your mapping of id = unique-article-name.
-
I'd say yes for the first one and for sure no for the second one...:)
-
To be honest, this is the solution I'd go for.
Mozollo, was your old site database driven?
Are you using the old article titles as the new page names?
If the answer is no to either of these, then the end result is you will have to manual map id to page name for each of the 800 pages you want to keep.
-
Tks again, so (sorry to repeat)
-
your solution : 1 .htaccess + redirect.php : located at the root of windows platform
-
Damien's : 1 .htaccess :located at the root of windows platform
Is that correct ?
-
-
1. .htaccess won't exist on the windows platform unless you installed a rewrite mod on the windows server. If you did then the .htaccesswill be in the root folder of the website (usually) you should check the documentation of the rewrite mod to confirm that.
2. If you have a windows PC then Xenu's Link Sleuth should be able to crawl the old site, you can then extract the information from the files that xenu can export.
3/4. If every unique id needs to get mapped to a unique url then yes, 800 times it is. If you have multiple ids that go to the same page you could do:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=113[3-8]$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^newscontent.asp$ ^name-of-the-article$ [L,R=301]
All ids from 1133 to 1138 will now redirect to the same page, you'll have to work out the regexs though.
-
To be clear about the different roles of the files in my solution, the .htaccess file will redirect every old url (whatever the id is) to a redirect script written in php.
This script will get the old url Id, load the article (to get the article name) and then redirect 301 to the new url. Only in php can you access the database.
Damien gave another solution, only based on htaccess. You have to write (or generate with code / software) 800 redirect directive for the htaccess file.
-
Tks to you both Baptiste placé Damiens Phillips and.
What do you mean when you say :
"The redirect.php file will load the article (or category as I understood) and do a 301 to the new url."
Is it en .htaccess file to create or a dedicated file.php , or both (redirect.php) ?
Yes, i'll all have to transfer each old article and i'll give them an unique urls per article..hope that reply your question !
-
Can you be a bit more precise about the new url ? Does every old article with id has to 301 to a page with a unique name ?
-
Hi,
Tks to you both Damiens Phillips and Baptiste placé.
But it seems to be a bit confusing for me for 2 reasons : language + technical knowledge !
I confirm that i'll move from windows platform to linux one.So if i understand :
1/ - htaccess is possible but where will it be located ? I assume at the root of the old platform (windows here..).
2/ - I'll have to crawl each article in order to get each id (by the way, have you got any crawler tool to advise ?)
3/ - For each of these urls i'll have to write such syntax :
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=1133$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^newscontent.asp$ ^name-of-the-article$ [L,R=301]4/ ...800 times ? Or is there a way to tell on 1 line like :
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=1133$ + ^id=1134$ + ^id=1197$ ...... [NC]Tks a lot again
-
I'll return the favour if it turns out he has moved from IIS
-
That's right but htaccess was asked. Thumbed up your answer so it goes first
-
But only if he's moved from Windows IIS hosting to Linux or Windows + PHP!
-
True ! The good syntax is :
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/home/newscontent.asp
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} id=([0-9]+)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ redirect.php?id=%1 [L] -
He'll need to add [L,R=301] at the end instead of just [L]. IIRC default behaviour is a 302 redirect.
You also can't reference a querystring in the RewriteRule, you have to use RewriteCond.
-
Hi,
From the .asp in the sample URLs I'm guessing you're hosted on Windows, if that's the case you'll need to get a rewrite mod for IIS such as ISAPI Rewrite 3. We've been using it for about 5 years now and it performs well. Their site has documentation that shows how it works.
You'll need to learn about regex expressions and a tool like Regex Buddy might be helpful.
I'm not aware of an tools that can automate generation, and I think that in your case you're going to need to do some manual work to set it up.
First you'll need a way of linking the old URLs to the new ones. Given the information you've provided, it's not clear how you'll be able to do this, so I'll make an assumption.
Assuming that name-of-the-article is the same as the title of newscontent.asp?id=1133, you'll need to generate a list, in excel for example, that lists the old contentid and the title of that document. You can then use formulae/macros to generate the rewrite rules which you would enter in the .htaccess file.
If you don't have a record of the id = title relationship in your old cms database (assumption!) then you might be able to do it by crawling the old site with a crawling program, exporting the data and then manipulating it. Otherwise you'll have to do it all by hand.
Rewrite rules generally take the form:
RewriteRule oldpageaddress newpageaddress [flags]
You'll also need to use the RewriteCond in order to base the rule on the querystring.
So for your example;
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=1133$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^newscontent.asp$ ^name-of-the-article$ [L,R=301]
You'd then need to repeat those two statements for each page you want to redirect.
-
Hi mozllo,
You won't be able to create a .htaccess for such urls, because the original url only has the ID of the article and you want the name of the article in the new url. This requires database access to know the new url.
I would suggest to put in your htaccess file :
RewriteRule ^home/newscotnent.asp?id=([0-9]+) redirect.php?id=$1 [L]
Edit : see good rule below
The redirect.php file will load the article (or category as I understood) and do a 301 to the new url.
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
-
How do I set a link as a "do follow"?
I have a page from a state agency linking to my website. They have good PA and DA. How do I tell google to "do follow"? It is already showing up as linked to my site, I just want to make sure I'm getting the SEO juice! 🙂
Link Building | | Kuhliff0 -
My site is linked from over 900 "The Globe"-domains - disavow or not?
Hi! As some of you may be familiar with, there is a giant spam-network with the same design and same page title on all domains: "The Globe - The world's most visited web pages". For example: theglobe.at
Link Building | | Sindre
theglobe.co.za
www.internet-search.us I've now discovered that over 900 of these spam-domains link to my site. My plan was of course to disavow them all, but Google is explicit on telling me to be careful. «Only disavow if you are certain that the links are damaging to your rankings». And to be honest, I'm not sure. Also: it seems drastic to disavow almost a thousand pages. I'm afraid to mess something up. What would you do?3 -
HOW DOES A CANONICAL INFLUENCE OR IMPACT ON A URL WITH BACKLINKS?
I have url A with a canonical to URL B. How is the behavior of the backlinks profile on url A? If some put a backlink to url A count as a backlink for url B?
Link Building | | Linio0 -
Gifly.com: url structure for new site with only one kind of page
Hi, we are launching a new site called Gifly.com, it's all about Gifs. At the moment, our robots.txt is blocking everything because we want to have a solid url structure before going public. There is only one kind of page, the permalink which has this form: http://gifly.com/QPmf/ (the four characters 'QPmf' are completely random) What we made different from the multitude of other Gifs site is that we are
Link Building | | mylittlepwny
trying to categorize gifs with hashtags, so we introduced these kind of urls: http://gifly.com/FoYi/
http://gifly.com/FoYi/#fail
http://gifly.com/FoYi/#blonde
http://gifly.com/FoYi/#dumb This was done for several reason, the first is that each gif can have up to 10
hashtags. Another approach to this could have been: http://gifly.com/fail/FoYi/
http://gifly.com/blonde/FoYi/
http://gifly.com/dumb/FoYi/ ...but we will face tons of duplicated contents for search engines because the same gif
would have 10x permalinks this way. The way we use to navigate between hashtags is via buttons/ajax (see the list of hashtags on the left)
We know that google may have a hard time understanding the site's structure, We'd like to know if the current set of urls, as: http://gifly.com/FoYi/
http://gifly.com/FoYi/#fail
http://gifly.com/FoYi/#blonde
http://gifly.com/FoYi/#dumb could be okay if we provide google a solid sitemap. We are thinking about a first sitemap with the list of hashtags,
each hashtag points to a second sitemap containing the list of new gifs uploaded for said hashtag. Thanks! gifly_logo_r_a.gif0 -
Still worth it to get listed on "resources" pages
Hello,
Link Building | | imcolej
I'm a new moz user who handles the online marketing for www.griefrecoverymethod.com. We provide grief support groups and 1-1 work as well as professional training for caregivers. We are on some websites as a grief resource, but not as many as I think we can be on. We have never attempted to reach out on a large scale to get added to sites. Is this type of link building worth a large campaign for us? Or has the ship sailed on link building with resource pages. I'm fairly new to all of this so any guidance at all would be appreciated. Thanks!0 -
Bought links from sites with target keyword in their URL
One of my rivals in a competitive field (real estate) has done this deliberately and extensively -- it accounts for about 2/3 of his inbound links. Result: he's now #1. How strong a ranking factor is keywords in source URL - ie, how easy is it to beat with other ranking factors?
Link Building | | Jeepster0 -
More "new" root domains or more pages on older domains?
I have been slowly building links via personal/professional networking, press from art shows, blogging, and such. I work with several non related domains & local blogs & press outlets, it is pretty easy for me to add a few new pages of content along with text links. Or should I just concentrate on getting links from totally "new" domains that have never linked to me before?
Link Building | | Mcarle0 -
Brainstorming - Unusual Ideas to get links in the "short term loan" industry
Hello, I would like to hear your strange/unusual/funny ideas for link building campaigns for a website targeted in the short term lending industry. It doesn't matter how easy/complicated it is to apply them, but the more realistic the better. Please don't post anything that was covered in detail somewhere else or something that does not have at least a small/tiny level of realism. An example: Extract the funniest/smart quotations related to money. Create an article where you explain that "even if you are in the short term loan industry" you care about your customers and you want them to educate them so in the future they can avoid getting in a situation when they have very few alternatives.
Link Building | | zoicaremus0