Removing URL Parentheses in HTACCESS
-
Im reworking a website for a client, and their current URLs have parentheses. I'd like to get rid of these, but individual 301 redirects in htaccess is not practical, since the parentheses are located in many URLs.
Does anyone know an HTACCESS rule that will simply remove URL parantheses as a 301 redirect?
-
I thought I'd come back and re-post the solution in case this shows up in SERPs or anyone other Moz members are looking for this answer (courtesy Noah Wooden of Izoox). HTACCESS:
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
# Strip set of opening-closing parenthesis from URL and 301 redirect.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [()]+
RewriteRule ^(.)[(]+([^)])[)]+(.*)$ /$1$2$3 [R=301,L]</ifmodule>Remember to put this in the proper 'order' on your htaccess file if you are doing any other redirecting. The code above 301 redirects URLs with parentheses into the exact same URL minus the parentheses.
-
thanks Merlin - Ill have their programmer try this.
-
Ok,
having looked at the site I would recommend that the changes are done via server side. I assume the htaccess file is been used to to parse category/subcategory/productname to a controller. Within that controller if the product is found clean the product name with the function below test it against the given url and do a 301 redirect to the cleaned name if they do not match
function clean_name($string) { $non_acceptable = '#[^-a-zA-Z0-9 ]#'; $string = preg_replace($non_acceptable, '', $string); $string = trim($string); $string = preg_replace('#[-_ ]+#', '-', $string); return $string; }
-
Hi Merlin - thank you.
Here is an example:
www.domain-name.com/category1/subcategory/product-name-details-(model-number)-length
needs to change to:
www.domain-name.com/category1/subcategory/product-name-details-model-number-length
Any suggestion would be great. Their programmer is having trouble creating a rule.
Thanks in advance
-
I have 1 or two suggestions. Could you provide an example of the URL? This will allow me to give a more definiive solution
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
-
After you remove a 301 redirect that Google has processed, will the new URL retain any of the link equity from the old URL?
Lets say you 301 redirect URL A to URL B, and URL A has some backlinks from other sites. Say you left the 301 redirect in place for a year, and Google had already replaced the old URL with the new URL in the SERPs, would the new URL (B) retain some of the link equity from URL A after the 301 redirect was removed, or does the redirect have to remain in place forever?
Technical SEO | | johnwalkersmith0 -
Rankings after manual penalty removal
I've just started working on a ecommerce website that was hit by Penguin 2.0 in May (It was ranking 2nd for it's major keyword at the time) and it hasn't been indexing for that keyword since After a lot of link removal, the reconsideration request was accepted and the manual penalty had been removed. Rankings haven't really improved and that specific keyword has not been reindexed The site does have a lot of not found errors (It was 5.5k but recently taken down to 4k) but it was still ranking before the penalty. Is there anything you believe I'm missing? Is it the onsite errors that are flagging the site as unreliable? I thought it would still appear for the keyword if that was the case
Technical SEO | | Sandeep_Matharu0 -
Removing indexed website
I had a .in TLD version of my .com website floated for about 15 days, which was a duplicate copy of .com website. I did not wish to use the .in further for SEO duplication reasons and had let the .in domain expire on 26th April. But still now when I search from my website the .in version also shows up in results and even in google webmaster it shows the the website with maximum (190) number of links to my .com website. I am sure this is hurting the ranking of my .com website. How can the .in website be removed from googles indexing and search results. Given that is has expired also. thanks
Technical SEO | | geekwik0 -
Category URL Duplicate Content
I've recently been hired as the web developer for a company with an existing web site. Their web architecture includes category names in product urls, and of course we have many products in multiple categories thus generating duplicate content. According to the SEOMoz Site Crawl, we have roughly 1600 pages of duplicate content, I expect primarily from this issue. This is out of roughly 3600 pages crawled. My questions are: 1. Fixing this for the long term will obviously mean restructuring the URLs for the site. Is this worthwhile and what will the ramifications be of performing such a move? 2. How can I determine the level and extent of the effects of this duplicated content? 3. Is it possible the best course of action is to do nothing? The site has many, many other issues, and I'm not sure how highly to prioritize this problem. In addition, the IT man is highly doubtful this is causing an SEO issue, and I'm going to need to be able to back up any action I request. I do feel I will need to strongly justify any possible risks this level of site change could cause. Thanks in advance, and please let me know if any more information is needed.
Technical SEO | | MagnetsUSA0 -
What are the SEO implications of URLs that use a # in them?
I have several clients who have begun to ask questions about sites that are designed to look like a single page. When you click on a link, the URL changes but it uses a # before (i.e. http://www.kelloggs.com/teamusa**/#**/teamusa/athletes/kerri-walsh.html. What are the SEO implications of having a page set up this way? I noticed that Google has indexed this page but the indexed URL does not include a #. Is Google indexing a separate version of this page? Any insights would be really helpful! Thanks
Technical SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
Best Practice to Remove a Blog
Note: Re-posting since I accidentally marked as answered Hi, I have a blog that has thousands of URL, the blog is a part of my site. I would like to obsolete the blog, I think the best choices are 1. 404 Them: Problem is a large number of 404's. I know this is Ok, but makes me hesitant. 2. meta tag no follow no index. This would be great, but the question is they are already indexed. Thoughts? Thanks PS A 301 redirect to the main page would be flagged as a soft 404
Technical SEO | | Bucky0 -
Removing 301 Redirects
Is it safe to remove old 301 Redirects from an SEO standpoint and can 301s dramatically affect seo? Prior to switching our old domain over to our new domain, we had (and currently still do) tons of 301 redirects, because of optimizing our file names and structure. Then our old domain was redirected to our new domain in the same redirect file. So that being said, now that our new domain has been up and running for about 3 months, would it be safe for me to get rid of the old 301 redirects and redirect anything that was on our old domain to our new domains home page? This would clean up our redirects tremendously and I hope would help with SEO.
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
/$1 URL Showing Up
Whenever I crawl my site with any kind of bot or a sitemap generator over my site. it comes up with /$1 version of my URLs. For example: It gives me hdiconference.com & hdiconference.com/$1 and hdiconference.com/purchases & hdiconference.com/purchases/$1 Then I get warnings saying that it's duplicate content. Here's the problem: I can't find these /$1 URLs anywhere. Even when I type them in, I get a 404 error. I don't know what they are, where they came from, and I can't find them when I scour my code. So, I'm trying to figure out where the crawlers are picking this up. Where are these things? If sitemap generators and other site crawlers are seeing them, I have to assume that Googlebot is seeing them as well. Any help? My developers are at a loss as well.
Technical SEO | | HDI0