PHP Mod Rewrite - php

Question

I have a .htaccess which does a basic rewrite which looks like the following:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) index.php?url=$1 [L,QSA]
The next condition is to remove www. from the URL and looks like this:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]
The problem is, when I call a link such as:
http://somesite.com/category/subcategory/?id=123
and add the www. manually, it rewrites the URL to this:
http://www.somesite.com?url=category/subcategory/?123
The page stills load but, I've been told that's terrible for SEO. Any thoughts of how to fix this?

Answer 1

Your current issue is that you have your WWW redirect after your main SEO rules, this is what happens behind the scenes:
You access http://somesite.com/category/subcategory/?id=123
Your rules internally redirect it to index.php?url=category/subcategory/?id=123
Your last rule to redirect without the www will also take place and will ended up redirecting it to:
http://somesite.com/?url=category/subcategory/?id=123
In order to fix that you would need your rules as follow:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) index.php?url=$1 [L,QSA]
Which leads us to your second issue, you've been using 301 redirects so your browser have cached some redirects and you will need to use a different browser temporarily to test your changes, preferable one you haven't used yet to access that site, while you clear the cache of that browser and wait for it to completely clear out.
Once the cache of your default browser has cleared you can use it as usual and you should get the same response.