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
-
Are long URLs bad for SEO?
Hi, I would like to know how bad is the long URLs that I have on my website. At the moment we have 543 long urls and I was wondering how big is the impact in my SEO. Thank you
Link Building | | Blind_Foundation3 -
Impact of "noopener" Links
Hey all, Recently got a PR piece published with a link back to our website. The link was not showing up in the Moz crawler, but I did find it under unlinked mentions. When I checked the page with the link, I saw that it contained rel="noopener". So a couple questions: Is this similar to a nofollow link? If the Moz Crawler is not registering it as a dofollow link, does that mean that Google will view it similarly? Thanks!
Link Building | | mostcg0 -
Are moderated external links in a "showcase" worth having?
We have some e-commerce software with several dozen websites that use our technology. The websites have links to the developer and design shops that made the site as well as the site itself. All of these sites are moderated so we don't have to worry about spam. My question is should some or all of these links be rel=nofollow? The links are definitely pointing to legit development shops but those sites aren't always strictly related to e-commerce or the keywords we're trying to rank for. Any thoughts on how to treat these links?
Link Building | | schof0 -
Footer Back Links Question "Site by built by"
Hi all I design and develop websites for clients within the UK. With each website I build, I always add a link to the footer of the website which links back to my website. I have always used the link anchor text "Site By Jump" but then decided to try to use the link anchor text to our benefit by changing the links across all of our portfolio of sites to be: "Graphic Design by Jump"
Link Building | | yousayjump
or
"Web Design by Jump" In the hope that this helped us rank better for those keyword phrases. Now something occurred to me the day. Most of the websites I build have no relevance to the content on our website. For example, I could build a website for Baby Food and add a backlink to our homepage which doesn't even mention the words "baby food". In some cases, the websites can have thousands of pages, each with this footer link appearing at the bottom of each page. My question is, could these backlinks potentially be seen as black hat or spam to a search engine? I.e. thousands of backlinks from websites that have no relevance in terms of content all linking back to my homepage? Thank you for reading and any advice would be greatly appreciated.0 -
Guest blogging on a "network" of sites. Good or BAD?
Hi guys! We have the opportunity to guest blog on a network of sites. Basically, this is a syndicated network of sports blogs (around 200) that all link to each other. They own and operate a blog for each major sports franchise. They each average a DA around 60, but almost all of their link equity comes from blogs they own and operate.... My question is this, should we take the opportunity to create editorial content with links back to our site. This would not be paid side or footer links, but real content relevant to their blog and our industry. On a side note; All of these site have a very decent DA and show up well in Google... Thanks for any advice!!!
Link Building | | brettcohen0 -
How do you identify "Power Pages"
Good Morning from postively tropical near double digits Celcius Wetherby UK 🙂 I've just read "5 Methods to improve, indexing crwaling & ranking". Tip number two says "Link for powefull pages to pages that need the juice" My question is please; "What tool / methodology exists to indentfy pages withing a site that could be deemed as "powerfull pges" ie deeper pages that receive more inbound links etc" Any insights welcome 🙂
Link Building | | Nightwing0 -
Some doubt about news section URL
I have a simple question, I have a website and i want to create a news category. I want to know what is the best way to create a url friendly for this category. I was looking around for news website like New York Times, and others, they use a format like this for the url http://domain.com/year/month/day/category/ etc. My question is about the use of the date in that format, like subdirectory, can somebody explain me about it. Any reason to use this format? What is the diference between using this format like: http://domain.com/news/çategory/article-date-id.html and this one use for the new york time shown before. Wich one will be work better? Thank You so much for your help
Link Building | | NorbertoMM0 -
Submitting my URL on web/business/service directories
Does it make sense to submit a business URL in as many relevant web/business directories as possible when kicking off a link building campaign? Submitting a free listing is obviously better than nothing, but when does it make sense to pay extra for a premium listing profile on some of these directories? There are just so many and a lot of them appear spammy, even though some of my competitors are getting traffic from them. Any advice on this would be great!
Link Building | | TheSquareFoot1