Forum Moderators: phranque
I want to make
http://www.example.com/blog/category/blog/?cattag=events
appear as
http://www.example.com/events/
on the users browser.
If this is not possible I would be happy with
http://www.example.com/blog/events/
I would like to have a general rule that would work on all cattag possibilities such as: events, learning, media, etc.
I am using Wordpress 2.6.1 with "pretty" permalinks turned on and my .htaccess file currently looks like:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
If you don't have the knowledge to edit the WordPress scripts, or if you don't want to because you'll have to re-edit them every time a new version is released (a good reason), then look into getting (or buying) and installing an "SEO-friendly-URL", "Search-engine-friendly-URL", or "SEF URL" plug-in for WordPress.
Jim
[edited by: jdMorgan at 10:52 pm (utc) on Nov. 19, 2008]
I don't want to change the link itself, if it can be avoided, but just what is displayed in the address bar of the browser.
So the user clicks on a link generated by Wordpress with the URL
http://www.example.com/blog/category/blog/?cattag=events
and "sees" in address bar
http://www.example.com/events/
which still leads to the location
http://www.example.com/blog/category/blog/?cattag=events
Is this not possible? Is this not good practice? I thought that this was exactly what the rewrite rules did?
Now you can indeed redirect client requests to change the browser's URL and address bar. But keep in mind what that means: Every request for a page on your server that is the result of a click on one of these "wrong-looking" Wordpress links will get redirected to the "right-looking" URL. This redirect response terminates the clients HTTP transaction with your server, and the client will have to re-issue the page request using the "right-looking" URL provided in that redirect response.
So, you will get two HTTP transactions logged for each 'real page' request, and your users will suffer the latency of two HTTP requests to get one page, making your site look slow compared to others. The double-logging will result in your page counts being doubled in your "Stats" reports as well.
Strongly suggest you look for that plug-in and pay for it if it's not a freebie.
The usual set up is this:
The link on the page is www.example.com/events/
The user clicks that link, and that URL is requested from the server.
But that URL doesn't really exist, because content is generated by a script at /blog/index.php
So the server uses an internal rewrite to translate a request for the URL www.example.com/events/ into an internal request for the server filepath /blog/index.php?cattag=events
and the index.php script in the /blog subdirectory happily generates the content and sends it back to the user.
An optional third step would be to detect a direct client request for "example.com/blog/index.php?cattag=events" and externally redirect that back to the friendly "example.com/events/" for the purposes of obscuring your internal architecture and/or for cleaning up search results if that unfriendly path has been previously indexed by search engines. This redirect is only done as an optional "clean-up" step after the previous changes have been made to a site.
I hope this helps. This stuff can be massively confusing. A few key points are:
Jim
An optional third step would be to detect a direct client request for "example.com/blog/index.php?cattag=events" and externally redirect that back to the friendly "example.com/events/" for the purposes of obscuring your internal architecture and/or for cleaning up search results if that unfriendly path has been previously indexed by search engines.
I thought that this was in fact all I needed to change the URL that the user sees without changing the site structure?
For example, I have in my .htaccess for the site root:
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.html
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.html$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
and this succeeds in changing the URL displayed in the browser from www.example.com/index.html to www.example.com/
Do I understand you right that this is not a good thing to do because it taxes the server unnecessarily? I have it in there so that anyone who has linked to my old index.html will not get a 404 error but still land on my new index.php page.
Otherwise, every time a visitor clicks your home page link, or every time a search engine spider follows one of those links, it will get no content, but instead it will receive a redirect response, telling the browser or robot to ask again for that page at the "/" URL. So, you will log two requests for each such click, and the 'real' URL will remain "/index.html" as far as the Web is concerned.
It's important to note that mod_rewrite does not change links embedded in your pages. It only "re-maps" or redirects incoming HTTP requests to your server. It executes after a request is received by your server, and before any content is served or any scripts are executed.
So to "change the link on a page," you have to do just that: Modify the source code of the HTML page or of the script that generates that HTML page, and change the link.
I cannot recommend an SEF plug-in for two reasons. First I'm not a WP user, and second, we do not allow commercial product promotion of any kind (or the posting of links to commercial sites) here on WebmasterWorld. The primary purpose of this policy is to prevent the forums from being polluted by posts whose only purpose is to promote a product or service, keeping the forums focused and bloat-free. Secondarily, the policy prevents members from accidentally creating a thread here that out-ranks their own site for a search on their domain name 20 minutes after they post to a thread; This can easily happen to pages which have a PR of 4 or less, maybe 5. Therefore, posts with 'real' URLs in them must and will be edited by the volunteer moderators here, which is a rather large time-waster. So we use only "example.com" in code examples, and we don't allow product recommendations for any specific commercial products or requests for product recommendations in the public threads.
A search on the term "WordPress SEF plug-in" and the other similar phrases I mentioned in my previous post should give you some results for providers. Then research forum threads containing the provider and/or product names to assess the quality of the plug-ins you find to find out which work well, and which have problems requiring complex mod_rewrite code to fix. Pay particular attention to the plug-ins' handling of "search," "category view," and "previous/next" URLs, as these URLs tend to be complex and problematic.
Jim
I now have all my internal links pointing to "/" instead of index.html. Thanks for the tip!
I will look into SEO plugins for wordpress and take it from there.
example.com
to
www.example.com
I set this up through my control panel for the domain.
Is this sufficient, or do I need to set up something in my .htaccess?
You also need to check that the implementation does not cause a redirection chain for some inputs.
