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
Related
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.
This question already has answers here:
Closed 10 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
mod rewrite and query strings
The only way I know to pass parameters in the URL is using the GET method in PHP. But I saw many websites using what seems to be parameters directly in the URL, like this:
http://.../page/2/
In this case, is "page" really a parameter? If so, how is it handled in the code?
Or is this a regular URL of a directory "2" located in a directory "page"? Would it mean that whenever a new post is created, the website creates all the pages and the corresponding directories?
Thanks
This is called url rewriting. Basically this means that you use an apache module to rewrite incoming urls to new urls which are then handled by apache
In your example http://www.test.com/page/2/ is probably rewritten to something like http://www.test.com/?page=2.
If you search the internet for Apache URL rewrite you will get enough results explaining how you can do this.
These are all conventions. GET parameters are not specific to PHP, this is how all browsers encode form data. Java-based webapps use semicolon-separated parameters for example.
You can write a simple layer to convert ?alpha=1&beta=2 to /alpha/1/beta/2 but iw tould be just a cheap gimmick (except in a very few legitimate cases like with Squid caches).
What today's websites do is to use a single entry point pattern. Usually with apache's mod_rewrite, all requests are handled by the index.php and there is a routing facility to choose the adequate handler PHP file for a specific URL scheme. These schemes can be easily defined by Regular Expressions.
So all in all you decide how your URLs are going to look like. It is not an easy task and there are many SEO snake oil salesmen out there who will make you do all kinds of crazy stuff. What a good URL does is to identify a content (document) inside your service and you must use that single URL throughout your service to address it.
And don't forget: cool URLs don't change. You will abandon your current code base in 2 years and rebuild your site from the ground up. Design your URL scheme in a way that makes sense from a logical point of view and not something dependent on your webapp design.
The example you gave is still a GET request.
What you are looking for is URL rewriting.
The popular image hosting site Imgur is great and I'm new to PHP. I'm just wondering how they manage to get an image to display in the page when entering a URL such as:
http://imgur.com/gallery/yjg8v
How does the script know to display a certain image from yjg8v? Are they using $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']?
Newbie here, not trying to be spoon fed, willing to read and study, just cant find much help on the internet about it.
Sites like imgur.com often "clean URLs" instead of traditional URLs with parameters.
Before clean URLs, you would see something like:
imgur.com/image.php?id=yjg8v
In your script, you can access the parameter via
$_GET['id'];
To produce clean URLs, you can use mod_rewrite in Apache (or a similar technology in your chosen web server) to map '/gallery/yjg8v' to '/image.php?id=yjg8v'.
You can find additional mod_rewrite information here.
yjg8v is a parameter being passed to a script called gallery. It doesn't look like a normal query string because there are various ways of coding a website and the normal query string cab look like a directory structure to the casual observer but actually be running through a front controller or mod_rewrite to get the parameters from the URL like a query string.
This SitePoint article is a bit old but demonstrates how this would work with mod_rewrite perfectly.
You can also use Apache's ForceType to accomplish this purely through PHP
To make it easier for you, this is called url rewrite, so the real url is like:
http://imgur.com/gallery/view.php?image=yjg8v
then use
$_GET['image']
What method can you recommended for creating search engine-friendly URLs? When coding in PHP that is. Ideally I would like something like:
http://www.example.com/article/523544
So it doesn't display the file it's opening (eg article.php)
It is quite necessary to generate a SEO friendly URL's so that most of the Search engines can easily index it.And the most interesting part with it that URL can easily correlate to the Page Content and the User can generate a Pretty URL as per the keywords he want to rank the page on different Search Engines(e.g. google.com,google.co.in,bing.com)
The best example to have Pretty Links is on Wordpress.It actually stores the Dynamic Page URL's in the Database itself.And when the Pretty Ur is being called,internally the htaccess is called and it redirects to the original dynamic page in the system.
Some basic tips from
Google
SEOmoz
may help you.
Some topics in SO:
mod_rewrite
nice url
Edit:
You need to place a .htaccess file in your document root that includes the following rules:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^article/([0-9]+)?$ 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'm trying to make a clean url for a blog on a dynamic website, but I think that the problem is that I don't know how to plan the website schema.
I read about how to use mod_rewrite and all I found is how to make "http://www.website.com/?category&date&post-title" to "http://www.website.com/category/date/post-title". that's works o.k for me.
The problem is that If my url looks like "http://www.website.com/blog/?id=34" this method won't work as far as I got it.
So, I have two questions:
1. Is there a way to use mod_rewrite (maybe read from a txt file) to read the post title of my blog and rewrite my url by date and post-title?
2. Should I rewrite my website to query the data from one index file in the homepage and use mod_rewrite to write the nice url? should I query also the date and the title of the post instead just the post ID?
mod_rewrite used to rewrite requests and it has nothing to do with urls. You have to change urls by hands.
yes, it's most common practice, to query the data from one index file
no, you can't use mod_rewrite to write the nice url
yes, an id must be present in the url along with title. your engine will just throw title away and use only id to retrieve an article.
Take a look at SO urls for an example
What you're talking about is commonly referred to as routing and lots of examples exist of different ways to do it with PHP. The most common approach uses the frontcontroller pattern, which means in the simple case rewriting all URLs to a single php file and then having that file determine what content to show dynamically based on the URL.
The most popular PHP frameworks (CakePHP, Symphony, Codeigniter, etc.) all have routing code in them which you might be able to use or might serve as inspiration. Alternatively this article covers lots of the basics if you want to do it yourself: http://www.phpaddiction.com/tags/axial/url-routing-with-php-part-one/
RewriteMap allows you to do all sorts of dynamic rewriting (text file, script, etc).