After much of researching i am confused with the difference between url rewriting,pretty url and hiding url...Though all the three almost performs the same functionality, but what is the difference between these three things?which is useful for SEO ? By seeing the URL can we identify whether is it just hiding url or url rewriting?
You seem to have been confused with the numerous terms that have been used in the articles and tutorials you have read.
Hopefully this will help out somewhat:
Pretty URL:This is sometimes also called a search-engine friendly URL (because that's exactly what it is), and will generally look something like: users/benmajor/profile/
Google now places a lot of weighting on the URL a page is accessed with, so it's a good idea to follow this pattern.
URL Rewriting:
This is the actual technology used to convert a pretty URL into its system counterpart. For example, using Apache's mod_rewrite module, you can easily convert users/benmajor/profile into profile.php?user=benmajor using the following RewriteRule:
RewriteRule ^users/[(.*)]/profile/?$ profile.php?user=$1
URL Hiding:
This one's a little more difficult to answer, since I don't know the context in which it was used, but I'm going to assume that this term simply means to hide the system URL (i.e. profile.php?user=benmajor) from the user.
Related
Hey so im working on a website and one part of it allows you to lookup a user based on their name. At the moment i have it using a $_GET request so the link would look like:
http://website.com/p?name=John+Smith
How would i be able to remove that ?name= because i see alot of sites doing things like:
http://website.com/p/John+Smith
how would i achieve this because to my knowladge their arent any other forum request types only Post and Get?
URL rewriting is definitely what you're looking to do. It's well worth playing carefully with it but lots of testing is recommended. With great power comes great responsibility!
Most dynamic sites include variables in their URLs that tell the site what information to show the user. The example you provided is exactly like this.
Unfortunately, a cleaned up URL cannot be easily understood by a server without some work. When a request is made for the clean URL, the server needs to work out how to process it so that it knows what to send back to the user. URL rewriting is the technique used to "translate" a URL like the last one into something the server can understand.
To accomplish this, you need to first create a text document called ".htaccess" to contain the rules. This would be placed in the root directory of the server. To tell the server to rewrite a URL pattern, you need to add the following to the file:
RewriteEngine On # Turn on the rewriting engine
RewriteRule ^p/[A-Za-z\+]$ /p/?name=$1 [NC,L] # Rewriting rule here
The NC bit denotes case insensitive URLs and the L indicates this is the last rule that should be applied before attempting to access the final URL.
You can do quite a bit with this one rule, but the specifics extend far beyond the space of my answer here.
https://www.addedbytes.com/articles/for-beginners/url-rewriting-for-beginners/
I would highly suggest reading that thorough guide to help you on your quest!
I am new to url rewrite . I have a completed site with urls like abc.com/abc.php?id=54&title=abcd. First of all i need friendly urls for SEO like abc.com/abc/54/abcd. I know that can b accomplish by redirecting urls in .htaccess (But i have to change all my urls in code too). can i accomplish that without changing all my code url. Second how to not disturb the assets.
Need Help .
Thanks
You must change all your URLs in the code.. The other functionalities should not be affected as the .htaccess rewriting will point to the old URLs.
You could find an workaround to redirect the user with javascript but this is not recommended for SEO. Something like:
abcd
JS (jQuery):
$(document).ready(function(){
$('a').click(function(e){
e.preventDefault();
// parse the url to get its components
window.location = '/' + parsedURL.filename + '/' + parsedURL.queries['id'] + '/' + parsedURL.queries['title'];
});
});
You can use this rule in your DOCUMENT_ROOT/.htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^([\w-]+)/([\w-]+)/([\w-]+)/?$ $1.php?id=$2&title=$3 [L,QSA]
This will let you use abc.com/abc/54/abcd in browser and it will internally route to abc.com/abc.php?id=54&title=abcd.
I know this will be a very controversial answer, but bear in mind... this is Googles answer to this question.
For so many people, they believe (because they've been taught) that dynamic URLs like page.php?id=3&entry=65 are bad for SEO.
However, that was before... and this is now.
In fact, with the progress that has been made by search engine crawlers such as "googlebot", the opposite is true.
It is best to leave your dynamic URLs alone and not rewrite them (for SEO purposes).
This excerpt is from Google Webmaster Central...
Myth: "Dynamic URLs cannot be crawled."
Fact: We can crawl dynamic URLs and interpret the different parameters. We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static. It's always advisable to use static content with static URLs as much as possible, but in cases where you decide to use dynamic content, you should give us the possibility to analyze your URL structure and not remove information by hiding parameters and making them look static.
Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That's our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems. If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases. If you want to serve a static equivalent of your site, you might want to consider transforming the underlying content by serving a replacement which is truly static. ... However, if you're using URL rewriting (rather than making a copy of the content) to produce static-looking URLs from a dynamic site, you could be doing harm rather than good.
You can read the full article here
I found this simply by searching the term "rewrite URL for dynamic pages". (on yahoo... not Google)
And this article by Barry Schwartz.
Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.
I have the following rewrite in my htaccess file:
RewriteRule residential-(.*)-(.*)-(.*)-(.*)-(.*)-(.*)-(.*)\.html$ http://MYDOMAIN.COM/listing.php?type=rent&recordID=$7
I then use a function to build the final URL - here is an example of one possible URL:
residential-house-for-rent-sa-adelaide+hills-aldgate-895.html
The reason I have used wildcards is because there are many thousands of possible combinations which I do not want to explicitly state in the htaccess file. The only element within the URL that actually controls the final output of the page is the recordID.
My question is - are there any issues that I should be aware of with using so many wildcards in building the URL ? My concern is that ultimately a user can type anything as a URL, so long as it fits with the patterns required in the htaccess file and so long as a record ID is in position $7, and it will reach a page. I am unsure if this will have any detrimental impact on SEO or Google crawling of the site or whether there are any other potential issues that I need to think about with this structure ?
Any help is appreciated :-)
So I have looked into this and so long as you are careful not to create rewrite rules that contradict each other then I can see no issue. On a side note, I have read that it is not a great idea to have too many rewrite rules in the .htaccess file as it slows things down a little.
What method can you recommended for creating search engine-friendly URLs? When coding in PHP that is. Ideally I would like something like:
http://www.example.com/article/523544
So it doesn't display the file it's opening (eg article.php)
It is quite necessary to generate a SEO friendly URL's so that most of the Search engines can easily index it.And the most interesting part with it that URL can easily correlate to the Page Content and the User can generate a Pretty URL as per the keywords he want to rank the page on different Search Engines(e.g. google.com,google.co.in,bing.com)
The best example to have Pretty Links is on Wordpress.It actually stores the Dynamic Page URL's in the Database itself.And when the Pretty Ur is being called,internally the htaccess is called and it redirects to the original dynamic page in the system.
Some basic tips from
Google
SEOmoz
may help you.
Some topics in SO:
mod_rewrite
nice url
Edit:
You need to place a .htaccess file in your document root that includes the following rules:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^article/([0-9]+)?$ article.php?id=$1 [L]
Make sure mod_rewrite enabled in Apache and you are allowed to use it.
If you read some questions in SO in this topic it will help you understand how mod_rewrite works.
To make your urls more search engine friendly you may want to use 'slugs' so you need to sanitize your article titles like in this url.
Ideally your URL needs to contain something about the topic of the URL. You gave the example of http://www.example.com/article/523544, where this is better than using standard query strings, it's still not ideal, as all that any search engine can see from it is that it's an article.
It's important to remember that the segment (a segment is the string between each slash) closest to the domain is the most important:
http://www.example.com/most-important/next-important/less-important/
I personally always try to use the following URL structure, and keep my page/article titles unique:
http://www.example.com/this-wonderful-article
Notice the use of dashes and not underscores, this is generally known as the preferred method. Using this method I usually generate and save the article's slug ('this-wonderful-article') in the database, and then search for that instead of an ID.
Appreciated that sometimes it's very difficult to just use slug, especially with a larger website. You may have multiple articles with the same title, or the website may have user-submitted content over which you have no control. If this is the case, you can use the ID without any worries, but just be sure to include the title of the article in the URL. Eg: http://www.example.com/this-wonderful-article/29587
If you're looking for a method of using these URLs then I'd suggest looking at some mod_rewrite tutorials. Personally I use a framework that does the majority of the legwork for me such as CodeIgniter (http://www.codeigniter.com), or you could use something like the Zend Framework or CakePHP. If you're only doing articles then it might be worth looking into a sturdy CMS like WordPress, although this depends largely on your requirements.
I am trying to use SEO-friendly URLs for a website. The website displays information in hierarchical manner. For instance, if my website was about cars I would want the URL 'http://example.com/ford' to show all Ford models stored in my 'cars' table. Then the URL 'http://example.com/ford/explorer' would show all the Ford Explorer Models (V-6, V-8, Premium, etc).
Now for the question:
Is mod_rewrite used to rewrite a query string style URL into a semantic URL, or the other way around? In other words, when I use JavaScript to set window.location=$URL, should the URL be the query string version 'http://example.com/page.php?type=ford&model=explorer' OR do I internally use 'http://example.com/ford/explorer' which then gives me access to the query string variables?
Hopefully, someone can see my confusion with this issue. For what it's worth, I do have unique 'slugs' made for all my top level categories (obviously, the site isn't about cars).
Thanks for all the help so far. I got the rewrite working but it is affecting other paths on the site (CSS, JavaScript, images). I using the correct path structure for all these includes (ie '/images/car.png' and '/css/main.css'). Do I have to use an absolute path ('http://example.com/css/main.css') for all files? Thanks!
Generally, people who use mod_rewrite use the terminology like this:
I want mod_rewrite to rewrite A to be B.
What this means is that any request from the outside world for page A gets rewritten to file B on the server.
You want the outside world to see URLs that look like
A) http://example.com/ford/explorer
but your web server wants them to look like
B) http://example.com/page.php?type=ford&model=explorer
I would say you want to rewrite (A) to look like (B), or you want to rewrite the semantic URL into a query string URL.
Since all the links on your page are clicked on by the user and/or requested by the browser, you want them to look like (A). This includes links that javascript uses in window.location. They can and should look like (A).
once you have set up mod_rewrite then your links should point to the mod_rewritten version of the URL (in your example: http://mysite.com/ford/explorer). Internally in your system you will still reference the variables as if they are traditional query string name value pairs though.
Its also worth pointing out that Google is now starting to advocate more logical URLs from a search engine point of view, i.e. a query string over mod rewrite
Does that mean I should avoid
rewriting dynamic URLs at all? That's
our recommendation, unless your
rewrites are limited to removing
unnecessary parameters, or you are
very diligent in removing all
parameters that could cause problems.
If you transform your dynamic URL to
make it look static you should be
aware that we might not be able to
interpret the information correctly in
all cases
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html
also worth looking at:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/08/optimize-your-crawling-indexing.html