Question

I have an entire website built upon a link scheme of query strings (i.e. ?page=about or ?page=individual&i=johndoe). Of course, in retrospect we have decided to go with a different (beautified) scheme in order to be more SEO friendly (i.e. /about/ or /individual/johndoe/).

Is there a way to accomplish this change using mod_rewrite on an Apache .htaccess file without having to change all the links sitewide? For instance, if you click a link to ?page=about it would permanently redirect you to /about/.

The code I have tried will successfully display /about/ as ?page=about, however, there is no redirect involved. And to be honest, I’ve never done any work in mod_rewrite (and it’s a bit intimidating), so I feel I’m going in the wrong direction. Nonetheless, here’s the code I’ve been working with so far:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)$ /$1/ [R]
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/$ /index.php?page=$1

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)$  /$1/$2/ [R]
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/$ /index.php?page=$1&i=$2
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/$ /index.php?page=$1&id=$2
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/$ /index.php?page=$1&bctid=$2
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)/$ /index.php?page=$1&bclid=$2

Any thoughts? I greatly appreciate any help.

Answer 1

First… The rewrite will only apply to rewriting requests. As a result your changes listed in your questions will now allow a page to be accessed in two ways:

/index.php?page=about
/about/

That means that unless you make changes throughout your site you will not really be making much of a change since everyone is pointing to the wrong URL.

I think instead you want to use mod_redirect, to redirect the user to the newer formed URL. I think you can then have that new url get mapped back to the version your site actually expects. I believe that this works, and doesn’t cause a loop.

That being said i think there is some SEO ding since there is a redirect on all pages, and no one actually points to the nicer URLs directly. That might not give you the results you want. Another option would be to use those regex that you provide, and actually make the real code change in all your views. That might be easy or hard depending on how you are making your links.

Good luck.

Clarification

I read your questions as you want several different things:

1. you don’t want to change anything huge in the way your site works but you want nice URLs (perhaps you are using a framework forces pages to be called like this). This means that you need to support both ugly and nice urls, which means you need mod_rewrite so that both versions work.
2. Your goal is to make better urls for search engines. That means that you should “encourage” users who use the ugly URLs to instead use the nice URLs. In that case you should probably clean up your old urls on your site. If not google will continue to crawl the ugly urls (since those will be the only ones it saw).
3. You can’t clean up other peoples URLs so you should probably mod_redirect their links to ugly urls to your nice ones. That way google will find the nice urls nicely. (this is the part i’m not sure of. Will the mod_redirect and mod_rewrite cause a loop? I think not, but if it does then only #1 and #2 would be doable, and you’d just need to live with other people’s sites pointing to your ugly urls