I'm new to mod_rewrite. And SEO.
I wanted to create a RewriteRule which essentially converts the following request:
http://xyz.com/property/state/city/name/propertyid/
into
http://xyz.com/property/?id=propertyid
This is what I used:
RewriteRule ^property/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([1-9][0-9]*)/$ /property/?id=$4 [NC]
As you can see, I don't consider the 3 preceding parameters, the id alone is sufficient to display the right page.
Now what I'm wondering is - how would a search engine know the 'desired' link to the property?
In other words, if this page were to be indexed, what link would it have in the search results?
(or does this depend on which link I spread around?)
Thanks.
Search engine crawlers can only obtain resources to which they know URLs to. So in order to have some resource crawled, the crawler needs to know its URL. This is primarily done by links on other web pages or by submission.
Now if you’re linking to /property/state/city/name/propertyid/, crawlers will request that URL. You server will then rewrite that URL internally to /property/?id=propertyid and return its contents back to the crawler. That’s it.
Unless you’re also linking to /property/?id=propertyid somewhere, crawlers won’t notice that /property/state/city/name/propertyid/ is actually mapped onto /property/?id=propertyid.
What search engines will do with the URL and the contents of the resource is a different story.
Related
Am new to the GSA and also don't have full admin access to the system so have to forward requests through to ICT Services to have changes made to our crawls and collections.
I hope someone can help with this question:
I have a single web page which has a list of links to about 180 documents (most of which are stored in the same subdirectory /docs/ which contains some 2400 documents). The rest are scattered across the site in a number of other subdirectories ie /finance/, /hr/ etc
At the moment all that happens is that I either get the single webpage indexed and none of the 180 links. Or I get the 1 page plus ALL of the 2400 documents in the /docs/ subdirectory.
I want to be able to just crawl/index this page and the 180 links and create a separate collection
Is there a simple way to do this?
Regards
Henry
Another possible solution is to use a robots.txt file to disallow crawling of the other pages you don't want. This would be a lot of work if you have to enumerate all of them though.
Your best bet is to see if there is some common URL pattern you can use to specify only the 180 pages you do want. For example, are the pages you do want all PDFs, and the other files you do not want are all some other type? If you can find something that is common for all the pages you want that isn't true for the other pages, you can use that to formulate a pattern (maybe using regex) to do what you want.
Instead of configuring the URL pattern under start urls and follow pattern,
configure the complete url. Get the 180 urls + 1 single web page url and put all 181 urls under start urls and follow pattern.By configuring complete urls, we could avoid GSA being crawling the other urls in the application as we are not keeping any common url pattern under follow urls.
Create a new collection and place all 180 doc urls + single web page
url (or generic pattern matching 181 urls) in that collection under "Include Content Matching the Following Patterns".
I assume that you do not want to index other 2400 documents on GSA.
Hope it helps.
Regards,
Mohan.
You would be better off using a meta and url feed for this.
It will allow you to control whether the GSA follows links in your 180 pages if you fed them in or whether you index your list page if you just feed that. You do this by specifying noindex or nofollow.
You'll still need to have your follow and crawl patterns and collections set up correctly but it's the easiest way to control what gets indexed.
You don't necessarily need to write code for this either, you can use curl and hand craft the xml.
The documentation is pretty good and easy to follow. Feeds Protocol Developers Guide
I wish to create a front-end for joomla using CodeIgniter. I prefer to make my own front-end that reads joomla database and I had my own "framework" to accomplish this, this is because I feel that joomla front-end is too heavy for high traffic websites, because it needs to accommodate for so many user needs, at the end you would really only use a small percentage of what joomla has to offer, yet a lot of unneeded core modules load and when you have a website with 300k visits per day, every bit of resource counts. And I like joomla because of its back-end and database structure.
Anyway, I'm looking to standardize a framework for joomla front-end using CodeIgniter instead of my own messy php code, the main issue for me is the ci router. In joomla I set sef url like these:
websitex.com/
websitex.com/category.html
websitex.com/category/subcat/123-alias.html
I'm looking for a router override that would allow me to process those urls. Basically, if any of the params has a number, then its for sure an article. If it doesn't, and its not index.php then its for sure a category or subcategory (if it exists).
And if I write this:
websitex.com/123 [OR]
websitex.com/category/123-alias.html
It would display the article with id 123. At least that's how it works in joomla and its what I'm trying to achieve here.
If anyone could point me in the right direction that would be great. Thanks in advance.
ADDED:
OK #ImranQamer comment left me thinking. What if I try to do it with conventional CI router? So I tried, and came up with this:
$route['default_controller'] = "controller/index";
$route['index'] = "controller/index";
$route[':num'] = "controller/article";
$route['(:any)/:num'] = "controller/article";
$route['(:any)'] = "controller/section";
I think it may work. I've run some tests and so far so good.
First and second line, if nothing is specified OR index.suffix (index.html) is the URI, then it goes to my controller index method.
Third line, if URI is a number (eg: /123.html) then it routes to controller/article.
Fourth line needs more testing, but apparently it will grab any URI that ends with a number (or number + suffix) and route it to controller/article. Still needs another rule to let article's title alias to be put in the URI (eg: /category/123-hello.html)
And last line, will treat the URI as one of the categories/section of the joomla site. In this controller though, I'm going to need to check if submitted URI corresponds to an existing section, in which case it gets displayed, otherwise, redirected to 404.
I'm gonna test this out for a while, but looks good so far.
I'm programming a website with SEO friendly links, ie, put the page title or other descriptive text in the link, separated by slashes. For example: h*tp://www.domain.com/section/page-title-bla-bla-bla/.
I redirect the request to the main script with mod_rewrite, but links in script, img and link tags are not resolved correctly. For example: assuming you are visiting the above link, the tag request the file at the URL h*tp://www.domain.com/section/page-title-bla-bla-bla/js/file.js, but the file is actually http://www.domain.com/js/file.js
I do not want to use a variable or constant in all HTML file URLs.
I'm trying to redirect client requests to a directory or to another of the server. It is possible to distinguish the first request for a page, which comes after? It is possible to do with mod_rewrite for Apache, or PHP?
I hope I explained well:)
Thanks in advance.
Using rewrite rules to fix the problem of relative paths is unwise and has numberous downsides.
Firstly, it makes things more difficult to maintain because there are hundreds of different links in your system.
Secondly and more seriously, you destroy cacheability. A resource requested from here:
http://www.domain.com/section/page-title-bla-bla-bla/js/file.js
will be regarded as a different resource from
http://www.domain.com/section/some-other-page-title/js/file.js
and loaded two times, causing the number of requests to grow dozenfold.
What to do?
Fix the root cause of the problem instead: Use absolute paths
<script src="/js/file.js">
or a constant, or if all else fails the <base> tag.
This is an issue of resolving relative URIs. Judging by your description, it seems that you reference the other resources using relative URI paths: In /section/page-title-bla-bla-bla a URI reference like js/file.js or ./js/file.js would be resolved to /section/page-title-bla-bla-bla/js/file.js.
To always reference /js/file.js independet from the actual base URI path, use the absolute path /js/file.js. Another solution would be to set the base URI explicitly to / using the BASE element (but note that this will affect all relative URIs).
How could a client detect if a server is using Search Engine Optimizing techniques such as using mod_rewrite to implement "seo friendly urls."
For example:
Normal url:
http://somedomain.com/index.php?type=pic&id=1
SEO friendly URL:
http://somedomain.com/pic/1
Since mod_rewrite runs server side, there is no way a client can detect it for sure.
The only thing you can do client side is to look for some clues:
Is the HTML generated dynamic and that changes between calls? Then /pic/1 would need to be handled by some script and is most likely not the real URL.
Like said before: are there <link rel="canonical"> tags? Then the website likes to tell the search engine, which URL of multiple with the same content it should use from.
Modify parts of the URL and see, if you get an 404. In /pic/1 I would modify "1".
If there is no mod_rewrite it will return 404. If it is, the error is handled by the server side scripting language and can return a 404, but in most cases would return a 200 page printing an error.
You can use a <link rel="canonical" href="..." /> tag.
The SEO aspect is usually on words in the URL, so you can probably ignore any parts that are numeric. Usually SEO is applied over a group of like content, such that is has a common base URL, for example:
Base www.domain.ext/article, with fully URL examples being:
www.domain.ext/article/2011/06/15/man-bites-dog
www.domain.ext/article/2010/12/01/beauty-not-just-skin-deep
Such that the SEO aspect of the URL is the suffix. Algorithm to apply is typify each "folder" after the common base assigning it a "datatype" - numeric, text, alphanumeric and then score as follows:
HTTP Response Code is 200: should be obvious, but you can get a 404 www.domain.ext/errors/file-not-found that would pass the other checks listed.
Non Numeric, with Separators, Spell Checked: separators are usually dashes, underscores or spaces. Take each word and perform a spell check. If the words are valid - including proper names.
Spell Checked URL Text on Page if the text passes a spell check, analyze the page content to see if it appears there.
Spell Checked URL Text on Page Inside a Tag: if prior is true, mark again if text in its entirety is inside an HTML tag.
Tag is Important: if prior is true and tag is <title> or <h#> tag.
Usually with this approach you'll have a max of 5 points, unless multiple folders in the URL meet the criteria, with higher values being better. Now you can probably improve this by using a Bayesian probability approach that uses the above to featurize (i.e. detects the occurrence of some phenomenon) URLs, plus come up with some other clever featurizations. But, then you've got to train the algorithm, which may not be worth it.
Now based on your example, you also want to capture situations where the URL has been designed such that a crawler will index because query parameters are now part of the URL instead. In that case you can still typify suffixes' folders to arrive at patterns of data types - in your example's case that a common prefix is always trailed by an integer - and score those URLs as being SEO friendly as well.
I presume you would be using of the curl variants.
You could try sending the same request but with different "user agent" values.
i.e. send the request one using user agent "Mozzilla/5.0" and a second time using User Agent "Googlebot" if the server is doing something special for web crawlers then there should be a different response
With the frameworks today and url routing they provide I don't even need to use mod_rewrite to create friendly urls such http://somedomain.com/pic/1 so I doubt you can detect anything. I would create such urls for all visitors, crawlers or not. Maybe you can spoof some bot headers to pretend you're a known crawler and see if there's any change. Dunno how legal that is tbh.
For the dynamic url's pattern, its better to use <link rel="canonical" href="..." /> tag for other duplicate
I have read a lot about URL rewriting but I still don't get it.
I understand that a URL like
http://www.example.com/Blog/Posts.php?Year=2006&Month=12&Day=19
can be replaced with a friendlier one like
http://www.example.com/Blog/2006/12/19/
and the server code can remain unchanged because there is some filter which transforms the new URL and sends it to the old, but does it replace the URLs in the HTML of the response too?
If the server code remains unchanged then it is possible that in my returned HTML code I have links like:
http://www.example.com/Blog/Posts.php?Year=2006&Month=12&Day=20
http://www.example.com/Blog/Posts.php?Year=2006&Month=12&Day=21
http://www.example.com/Blog/Posts.php?Year=2006&Month=12&Day=22
This defeats the purpose of having the nice URLs if in my page I still have the old ones.
Does URL rewriting (with a filter or something) also replace this content in the HTML?
Put another way... do the rewrite rules apply for the incoming request as well as the HTML content of the response?
Thank you!
The URL rewriter simply takes the incoming URL and if it matches a certain pattern it converts it to a URL that the server understands (assuming your rewrite rules are correct).
It does mean that a specific resource can be accessed multiple ways, but this does not "defeat the point", as the point is to have nice looking URLs, which you still do.
They do not rewrite the outgoing content, only the incoming URL.