Question

I have a very basic two-page website: the home page, and an about page. What I’m trying to do is use htaccess to rewrite the URLs so that the appear as:

• domain.com/ (for the home page)
• domain.com/about (for the about page)

In the actual folder structure of the site, the homepage is /index.php and the about page is /about.php (both appear in root).

I’ve been doing research into using alias but unfortunately my hosting (Dreamhost) doesn’t allow access to httpd.config so that’s out the window and I’m left with using rewrite rules in the htaccess file.

Since the index.php file will appear in the domain root (http://domain.com/) automatically, I’ve so far managed to make the about page appear correctly at domain.com/about using these lines:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^about$ /about.php

I’m also using 301 redirects so that for example, domain.com/about/ (with the trailing slash) also directs back to the /about URL like this:

Redirect 301 /about/ http://domain.com/about 

This works great.

However the index.php and about.php files still also show if you go to the correct URL within your browser (eg: domain.com/about.php) so as a result the search engines are seeing (and indexing) two versions of each page! I’ve set up the correct canonical metadata within each page but this doesn’t seem to have had any effect (the canonical metadata have been within the page markup ever since the site went live).

So how would I go about firstly doing a ‘blind’ rewrite (for want of a more technical term) for the two files so that the URLs look correct, but also effectivly ‘block’ direct access to the files – ensuring that if someone were to attempt to access the php files directly, the URL would still appear in the visitor’s browser as the ‘pretty’ versions rather than the full file name and php extension?

Any advise would be hugely appreciated, I’ve been researching this for another couple of days now (I don’t think there’s anything quite the same as this anywhere on here already) and cannot for the life of me work this one out!

Answer 1

Check $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] in the PHP files. If that contains the filename (instead of the URI that you want), then do a 301 or 404 or whatever you want. Else serve the page as usual.

You can also do a

RewriteRule ^about.php - [L,gone]

or

RewriteRule ^about.php /about [L,R=301]

but this has to go before your other RewriteRules. It will send a 410 Gone or a 301 Moved Permanently response if the page is accessed via /about.php. See Apache Module mod_rewrite for the complete documentation of mod_rewrite.