SEO friendly URLs with apache
Published: 13 years ago
- Snippet Length: 15 minutes
- Difficulty: Easy-Intermediate
- Technologies: PHP, Linux System Administration, Apache
Here is my take on the popular apache mod re direct;
So your wanting your links to look readable by humans and search engines such as ;
www.yoursite.com/news/19/latest-update-notes.html instead of
www.yoursite.com/news/index.php?newsId=19&newsTitle=latest%20update%20notes
One way of doing this is telling Apache that when it encounters a certain url that is passed look for a different page.
Starting Point...
1. You can start by creating a .htaccess config in the root directory of the site via SSH;
nano .htaccess
2.Inside this .htaccess file enter the following below;
RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^news/([0-9]+)/(.*?).html$ news/index.php?id=$1
Lets break this down; "RewriteEngine On" basically just turns the setting on for this domain so that we can use the redirect ( pretty simple ).
The second line creates a rule that the directory we can look at is ^news/ so that would be /news/.
The next part /(0-9+)/ will only accept integers and wil be a virtual directory, this will be the id of the news item which is dynamically generated.
The next part (.*?).html$ will allow any text preceding .html which is a fixed element or the url. The $ dollar sign ends the first argument of the 2nd line.
Save & Restart Apache...
3.Save the config file (CTRL + X) and y to confirm then hit enter.
4.Restart apache – it depends what version of linux your using most of the time you can just do
apachectl -k graceful
Conclusion...
There's also a big debate as to whether or not search engines actually rank web pages higher because of the .html ending, I tend to stick with it because some research does suggest that search engines rank static content quite highly ( but this is constantly changing )
However the W3C are leaning more towards the removal of .html from links such as;
www.yoursite.com/news/19/website-launches-new-feature/
It's all really a matter of preference as I feel there is no real right answer at this moment.
My next snippet will show you how to create a function that will generate the friendly urls from the news title of the item (from database).
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