Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
URL rewriting from subcategory to category
-
Hello everybody!
I have quite simple question about URL rewriting from subcategory to category, yet I can't find any solution to this problem (due to lack of my deeper apache programming knowledge).
Here is my problem/question:
we have two website url structures that causes dublicate problems:
1 and 2 pages are absolutely same (both also returns 200 OK). What we need is 301 redirect from 2 to 1 without any other deeper categories redirects (like www.website.com/language/category/1/169/ redirecting to .../category/1/ or .../category/).
Here goes .htaccess URL rewrite rules:
RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&par4=$6&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/$ /index.php?lang=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
There are other redirects that handles non-www to www and related issues:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/lt/$ http://www.domain.lt/
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.lt
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.lt/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.domain.lt/$1/ [R=301,L]
At this moment we cannot solve this problem with rel canonical (due to our CMS limits).
Thanks for your help guys!
If You need any other details on our coding, just let me know.
-
That's great!
Glad to help anytime. Sha -
Thank You very much! The code You provided worked very well and solved our problem.
-
Thanks Alan Mosley and Sha Menz! We will try to implement given advices tonight (at low traffic hours) and check back soon with results. Sha, thats ok with line breaks, we will figure it out. Thanks for your support once again!
-
Sorry that my answer appears to have lost all line breaks...seems to be some css issues at the moment.
Hoping you can copy it out and separate the lines ....I will try to reformat it as soon as I can, but right now it just keeps loading funky.
Sha
-
Hi kundrotas, The problem you have is that the code used for .htaccess functions is not terribly "intelligent". It does not allow for the use of "IF" statements etc. This being the case, the better option is to move the action to within the actual code. This is the rule at question RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] The easiest thing to do is in index.php add a check for par1 // If par1 is 1 and everything else is blank send it to the root. if( $par1 == '1' && $par2 == '' && $par3 == '' && $par4 == '' && $par5 == '' && $par6 == '' ) { $location = "/$lang/$idr/"; header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently'); header ('Location: '.$location); } Hope that helps, Sha
-
in windows on a IIS server it would be
<match url="^category/1$"><action type="Rewrite" url="category"></action></match>
i think in a htaccess file it would be sothing like
RewriteRule ="^/category/1$ http://www.domain.lt/category [R=301,L]
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
-
Backlinks that go to a redirected URL
Hey guys, just wondering, my client has 3 websites, 2 of 3 will be closed down and the domains will be permanently redirected to the 1 primary domain - however they have some high quality backlinks pointing the domains that will be redirected. How does this effective SEO? Domain One (primary - getting redesign and rebuilt) - not many backlinks
Technical SEO | | thinkLukeSEO
Domain Two (will redirect to Domain One) - has quality backlinks
Domain Three (will redirect to Domain One) - has quality backlinks When the new website is launched on Domain One I will contact the backlink providers and request they update their URL - i assume that would be the best.0 -
Old URLs Appearing in SERPs
Thirteen months ago we removed a large number of non-corporate URLs from our web server. We created 301 redirects and in some cases, we simply removed the content as there was no place to redirect to. Unfortunately, all these pages still appear in Google's SERPs (not Bings) for both the 301'd pages and the pages we removed without redirecting. When you click on the pages in the SERPs that have been redirected - you do get redirected - so we have ruled out any problems with the 301s. We have already resubmitted our XML sitemap and when we run a crawl using Screaming Frog we do not see any of these old pages being linked to at our domain. We have a few different approaches we're considering to get Google to remove these pages from the SERPs and would welcome your input. Remove the 301 redirect entirely so that visits to those pages return a 404 (much easier) or a 410 (would require some setup/configuration via Wordpress). This of course means that anyone visiting those URLs won't be forwarded along, but Google may not drop those redirects from the SERPs otherwise. Request that Google temporarily block those pages (done via GWMT), which lasts for 90 days. Update robots.txt to block access to the redirecting directories. Thank you. Rosemary One year ago I removed a whole lot of junk that was on my web server but it is still appearing in the SERPs.
Technical SEO | | RosemaryB3 -
Category URL Pagination where URLs don't change between pages
Hello, I am working on an e-commerce site where there are categories with multiple pages. In order to avoid pagination issues I was thinking of using rel=next and rel=prev and cannonical tags. I noticed a site where the URL doesn't change between pages, so whether you're on page 1,2, or 3 of the same category, the URL doesn't change. Would this be a cleaner way of dealing with pagination?
Technical SEO | | whiteonlySEO0 -
URL - Well Formed or Malformed
Hi Mozzers, I've been mulling over whether my URLs could benefit a little SEO tweaking. I'd be grateful for your opinion. For instance, we've a product, a vintage (second hand), red Chanel bag. At the moment the URL is: www.vintageheirloom.com/vintage-chanel-bags/2.55-bags/red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag-1362483150 Broken down... vintage-chanel-bags = this is the main product category, i.e. vintage chanel bags 2.55-bags = is a sub category of the main category above. They are vintage Chanel 2.55 bags, but I've not included 'vintage' again. 2.55 bags are a type of Chanel bag. red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag = this is the product, the bag **1362483150 **= this is a unique id, to prevent the possibility of duplicate URLs As you no doubt can see we target, in particular, the phrase **vintage. **The actual bag / product title is: Vintage Chanel Red 2.55 classic double flap bag 10” / 25cm With this in mind, would I be better off trying to match the product name with the end of the URL as closely as possible? So a close match below would involve not repeating 'chanel' again: www.vintageheirloom.com/chanel-bags/2.55-bags/vintage-red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag or an exact match below would involve repeating 'chanel': www.vintageheirloom.com/chanel-bags/2.55-bags/vintage-chanel-red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag This may open up more flexibility to experiment with product terms like second hand, preowned etc. Maybe this is a bad idea as I'm removing the phrase 'vintage' from the main category. But this logical extension of this looks like keyword stuffing !! www.vintageheirloom.com/vintage-chanel-bags/vintage-2.55-bags/vintage-chanel-red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag Maybe this is over analyzing, but I doubt it? Thanks for looking. Kevin
Technical SEO | | well-its-1-louder0 -
Removing Redirected URLs from XML Sitemap
If I'm updating a URL and 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL, Google recommends I remove the old URL from our XML sitemap and add the new URL. That makes sense. However, can anyone speak to how Google transfers the ranking value (link value) from the old URL to the new URL? My suspicion is this happens outside the sitemap. If Google already has the old URL indexed, the next time it crawls that URL, Googlebot discovers the 301 redirect and that starts the process of URL value transfer. I guess my question revolves around whether removing the old URL (or the timing of the removal) from the sitemap can impact Googlebot's transfer of the old URL value to the new URL.
Technical SEO | | RyanOD0 -
Approved Word Separators in URLs
Hi There, We are in the process of revamping our URL structure and my devs tell me they have a technical problem using a hyphen as a word separator. There's a whole lot of competing recommendations out there and at this point I'm just confused. Does anyone have any idea what character would be next-best to the hyphen for separating words in a URL? Any reason to prefer one over another? Some links I've found discussing the topic: This page says that "__Google has confirmed that the point (.), the comma (,) and the hyphen (-) are valid word separators in URL’s.": http://www.internetofficer.com/seo/google-word-separator/ This page suggests the plus (+) symbol would be best: http://labs.phurix.net/posts/word-separators-in-urls This guy says he's tested and there's a whole bunch of symbols that will work as word separators: http://www.webproguide.com/articles/Symbols-as-word-separators-a-look-inside-the-search-engine-logic/ I'm leaning towards the tilde (~) or the plus (+) sign. Usage would be like so: http://www.domain.com/shop/sterling~silver OR /shop/sterling+silver etc... Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | Richline_Digital1 -
Singular vs plural in urls
In keyword research for an ecommerce site, I've found that widget, singular gets a lot more searches than widgets, plural AND is much less competitive. Is it better for SEO purposes to have the URLs (and matching title tags) in the catalog as /brass-widget.html, /steel-widget.html, etc., or /brass-widgets.html, etc.? I'm worried that a) searches for widgets will pass by the singular urls but not vice versa, and b) the singular form will strike visitors as bad grammar. Any advice?
Technical SEO | | AmericanOutlets0 -
Someone is redirecting their url to mine
Hello, I have just discovered that a company in Poland www.realpilot.pl is directing their domain to ours www.transair.co.uk. We have not authorised this, neither do we want this. I have contacted the company and the webmaster to get it removed. If you search for the domain name www.realpilot.pl we (www.transair.co.uk) come up top. My biggest worry is that we will get penalised by Google for this re-direct as it appears to be done using some kind of frame. Does anyone know anything about this kind of thing? Many Thanks Rob Martin
Technical SEO | | brightonseorob0