301 Redirect using rewrite rule in .htaccess
-
Hi guys,
I have these types of URLs with the format below that are seen as duplicate contents
http://www.mysite.com/index.php?a=11&b=15&d=3&c=1
I wanted to permanently redirect them to my homepage. I am thinking if this is possible in .htaccess using rewrite conditions?
Thanks in advance...
-
This is a solutions, but its an ugly one, does anyone really wants a home url of http://www.mysite.com/index.php?a=11&b=16&c=5&d=1&page=2. you then have the problem of people linking to that page.
I believe michael said in a previous post that they were prodused by his CMS, the best idea would be to get rid of them rather then deal wioth them if posible.
-
From memory, I believe Michael has these urls produced by his CMS and are unnecessary, i could be getting him mixed up with someone else.
also doing this in Google does not help other search engines, you would need to do it in all search engines for all possible combinations for each pages, this can become un-manageable. -
I have to say I agree with Sha on this one.
If you are not confident in using .htaccess then I wouldn't bother. I think there is a much easier solution:
1- As Sha said, use webmaster tools to tell Google how to handle these parameters, this should slowly start to take them out of the index.
2- Add rel=canonical to all your pages, this way even if parameters are added, the rel=canonical will always point back to the original and remove any risk of duplicate content.
I hope this helps.
Craig
-
Hi Michael,
You do not need to make any changes to your .htaccess file. Actually, if you 301 these URLs you will break your search so that it no longer works.
The solution I would use is to go into Google Webmaster Tools and tell Googlebot to ignore the parameters you are concerned about.
In your code, the ? says "here come some parameters" and the & separates those parameters. So, in the case you have quoted, the parameters are a, b, c, d.
Be aware of course, that Roger will still see these URLs as duplicates since he doesn't know about your private conversations with Google
This means that they will still appear in your SEOmoz report, but as long as you make a note of them so you know they can be ignored that shouldn't be a problem.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
I disagree more with the level of apprehension, rather than the premise itself. Anyhow I’m off to bed.
-
Alan, we will just have to disagree on this topic.
I too have studied Computer Science in college. I too have a wall filled with MS certifications. I too have been programming since before the internet and even before hard drives existed. I am only 40 but the first PC I used was an Atari 800 and the command to save my work was "csave" which stood for "cassette save". This was before even floppy disks were popular and data was saved to cassette tapes.
I certainly am not forbidding anyone from taking whatever action they deem fit. It is indeed up to Michael or any reader to assess what changes they are comfortable making for their site.
The point I am making is many people grow very comfortable in making changes to their website, especially SEO-related changes. It is relatively safe to do such. If you make a mistake, your site may not rank as well, may not load as fast, may not appear correctly in all browsers and so forth. The consequences are relatively low.
Making changes in an htaccess file is a completely different ballgame. One character out of place and your site can instantly be taken off line. If that happened, it's actually not so bad compared to other problems which can be created. A character out of place can disable your site security and the person making the change would likely not realize the problem until their site was hacked. A character out of place can cause other functionality of your site to not work correctly. It can also cause the fix being implemented to work in some but not all instances.
I highly encourage users to make most changes to their sites according to their comfort level. Htaccess modifications is a clear exception. A user can easily be mislead to believe their site is working fine only to later realize there is a major problem with the site. There are countless instances where a site was exploited due to a vulnerability in the htaccess file. I therefore strongly recommend for users never to touch their htaccess file unless they are extremely confident in the changes they are making. Many websites will offer code snippets which can provide users a false sense of security and lead them to experiment. It is a bad idea to do such with the htaccess file.
-
I have
been programming since before the internet came to be, I have studied Computer
Science at University and passed numerous Microsoft Certifications, and while I
would not discount study, it is my experience that I have never met a great
programmer that did not learn by trail and error, after all this is how you
become experienced. There is no danger in using a backup, RegEx does not work
sometimes and not others, it is not dynamic, it is a static peace of code. You
will not excel at SEO unless you learn these things. I am sure Michael is capable
of deciding if he wants to do it himself, he seems to have got a long way already.
It would seem to me he is learning quite quickly. You may suggest that you
would not try, but I don’t think it is correct to forbid others. -
I'm sorry but the idea of advising users without expertise to modify their htaccess file is completely reckless. The trial & error approach can easily lead to circumstances where the rule works some of the time but not always. Worse, it can negatively impact other rules and site security causing major problems.
Without knowing the details of the site involved, I tend to make the safe assumption the site is important and there are one or more people who's livelihoods depend on the site. Having worked with clients who have recovered from the damage caused by errors in htaccess files I will firmly share my experience that no one other then a qualified expert should ever touch the file. The potential for damage is very high.
-
All he needs to do is keep a back up, and he can have as many tries as he wants. He simpley has to replace the file with his back up if he goes wrong.
There is little danger here. -
htaccess rewrite rules are based on Regex expressions. Your current Regex rewrite rules can be modified to adjust for the specific URLs. You need to locate an experienced programmer to write the expressions for you.
-
Hi Mchael.
Yes, you can use htaccess to rewrite or redirect the URL.
Where do these URLs presently lead to? If these URLs are duplicates for pages on your site, I would suggest using a 301 redirect to send the traffic to the proper URL rather then your home page.
If your server uses cPanel, there is a Redirect tool you can use. This tool makes the process of adding a redirect easier and safer then modifying your htaccess file. Your htaccess file controls various aspects of your site's security, accessibility and SEO. The slightest error can cause your site to instantly be inaccessible. I would not recommend making any changes to your htaccess file except by an experienced programmer. Even using the correct code in the wrong order can lead to problems.
-
I work on microsoft servers, i dont use .htaccess
but this is the rule i woudl write to fix all urls stating with index.php, no mater what the querystreing
<rule name="DefaultRule" stopprocessing="true"><match url="^index.php"><action type="Redirect" url="/" appendquerystring="false"></action></match></rule>
but try this let me know if it works i have a few other ideas
RewriteRule ^/index.php / [R=301,L]
-
Hi Alan,
I think it's now clear to me that they should be rewritten. Thanks for pointing me to the right direction.
I have a classified site and in my .htaccess I have these rewrite rules by default
RewriteRule ^/?(new)/(1_day)/([0-9]+)/([^./\"'?#]+).html$ index.php?a=11&b=$3&c=65&d=4 [L] ##category newest 1day
RewriteRule ^/?(new)/(1_week)/([0-9]+)/([^./\"'?#]+).html$ index.php?a=11&b=$3&c=65&d=1 [L] ##category newest 1week
RewriteRule ^/?(new)/(2_weeks)/([0-9]+)/([^./\"'?#]+).html$ index.php?a=11&b=$3&c=65&d=2 [L] ##category newest 2weeks
RewriteRule ^/?(new)/(3_weeks)/([0-9]+)/([^./\"'?#]+).html$ index.php?a=11&b=$3&c=65&d=3 [L] ##category newest 3weeksRewriteRule ^/?(new)/(1_day)/([0-9]+)/([^./\"'?#]+)/([0-9]+).html$ index.php?a=11&b=$3&c=65&d=4&page=$5 [L] ##category newest 1day pages
RewriteRule ^/?(new)/(1_week)/([0-9]+)/([^./\"'?#]+)/([0-9]+).html$ index.php?a=11&b=$3&c=65&d=1&page=$5 [L] ##category newest 1week pages
RewriteRule ^/?(new)/(2_weeks)/([0-9]+)/([^./\"'?#]+)/([0-9]+).html$ index.php?a=11&b=$3&c=65&d=2&page=$5 [L] ##category newest 2weeks pages
RewriteRule ^/?(new)/(3_weeks)/([0-9]+)/([^./\"'?#]+)/([0-9]+).html$ index.php?a=11&b=$3&c=65&d=3&page=$5 [L] ##category newest 3weeks pagesunfortunately, these rules could not handle all URLs of the same format with different variables like the following below
http://www.mysite.com/index.php?a=11&b=15&d=3&c=1
http://www.mysite.com/index.php?a=11&b=15&d=3&c=2
http://www.mysite.com/index.php?a=11&b=16&c=5&d=1
http://www.mysite.com/index.php?a=11&b=16&c=5&d=1&page=2
http://www.mysite.com/index.php?a=11&c=5&d=1&b=230
Any idea on how I can solve this problem to avoid duplicate content?
Thanks in advance...
-
rewrite and redirect are not the same thing. you want to 301 them, but better still why do you have them?
Do you have a wordpress site?If these errores were found by a crawler it means that you have the links on your site somewhere. the best thing to do is correct the links. 301's leak link juice you want to limit their number.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
We're currently not using schemas on our website. How important is it? And are websites across the globe using it?
Schemas looks like an important thing when it comes to structuring your website and ensuring the crawl bots get all the details. I've been reading a lot of articles around the web and most of them are saying that schemas are important but very few websites are using it. Why so? Are the schemas on schema.org there to stay or am I wasting my time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shreyans920 -
301 redirection pointing to noindexed pages
I have rather an unusual situation where a recently launched affiliate site does not have any unique content as its all syndicated content. For that reason we are currently using the noindex,nofollow meta tags to keep the pages out of the search engines index until we create unique content for the pages. The problem is that due to a very tight timeframe with rebranding, we are looking at 301 redirecting (on a page to page basis) another high authority legacy domain to this new site before we have had a chance to add unique content to it and remove the noindex,nofollow tags. I would assume that any link authority normally passed through the 301 would be lost in this scenario but Im uncertain of what the broader impact might be. Has anyone dealt with a similar scenario? I know this scenario is not ideal and I would rather wait until the unique content is up and noindex tags are removed before launching the 301 redirect of the legacy domain but there are a number of competing priorities at play outside of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LosNomads0 -
Url rewrite & 301 redirects
Hi all I am having some issues rearding url rewrites and 301 redirects with 1 and 1 hosting and am unsure of the best approach. The website is a custom made shopping cart system with categories and products. The current urls for categories are : index.php?l=product_list&c=1 The new url format required is : /banner-stands The current urls for products are : index.php?l=product_detail&c=1&p=1 The new url format required is : /banner-stands/banner-stand Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vividwebdesign0 -
301 Redirecting an Entire Site
I have a question which has had me thinking for hours..... If SITE A is ranking well on a number of search phrases and you 301 that site to another (SITE B). The site will change on the Google SERPs to the site which you've re-directed to... In this case SITE B. But how do you maintain the rankings of SITE A?. Do you keep the rankings of SITE A forever? Or will your rankings of SITE A (now SITE B) gradually slip as other sites rank higher? As you can no longer edit SITE A does Google take into consideration the content on SITE B and no longer take anything that SITE A had to offer into consideration? SITE B has simply replaced it in the SERPs??...... Please can anybody help? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | karl620 -
External links point to 403 page - how to 301 redirect if no file extension?
Hi guys, After moving from an old static .htm site to Wordpress, I 301'd all old .htm urls fine to the new trailing slash foldery style /wordpress-urls/ in htaccess no problem. But Google Webmaster Tools tells me I still have hundreds of external links pointing to a similar version of the old urls (but without the .htm), giving lots of not founds and 403s. Example of the urls linked to that 403 not found: http://www.mydomain.com/filename So I'm wondering how I do a 301 redirect from a non-exisiting url that also has no file extention as above and is not like a folder? This seems like a lot of possible external link juice to lose. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0 -
What happens with a 301 redirected page?
Hi All, What happens with an indexed page that I 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
Is it removed from the Google index after a while? Thanks0 -
Is there a way to find out how many 301 redirects a site gets?
If you do a search on "personal loans" on Google the first non-local/personal result is onemainfinanical.com. They have far fewer links showing in OSE and YSE than the other sites. I know onemainfinanical.com is a Citbank site so I'm trying to determine if they are ranking so high b/c they are getting 301 link juice from old Citibank.com authority pages. Is there anyway to check to see what sites are sending link juice through a 301 redirect instead of a direct link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fthead90 -
301 Redirect With A Message And Delay
Hello, I'd like to sell a site I own. I'd like the site to be redirected to the buyers site with a 301 redirect. But I'd like the viewer to be informed that the site was purchased by this company and they will be redirect in 5 seconds.I'd like for the redirect to be a complete 301 and pass as much linklove as possible. Are you familiar with how to do this? Thanks, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0