Enabling SEO Through Mod Rewrites
Mod rewrite tools are used by web developer’s to enhance SEO. In this age of competition, the Mod rewrite tools provide a distinct advantage to webmasters who can use them to avoid duplicate content, redirect relocated urls, provide search engine friendly urls, and on the whole strengthen the overall website SEO. Duplicate content can be quite a nuisance and pose problems for webmasters. Hence the best solution is to use mod rewrites, which works on the principles of the process of ‘Canonicalization’ and is capable of taking care of duplicate content that plagues most webmasters.
The Canonicalization Process
By using the process of Canonicalization, you will be able to pick the top or best URL from the numerous choices or web URLs presented by search engines. Let’s take an example to understand this better:
http://www.SEOintelligence.com/
http://SEOintelligence.com/
http://www.SEOintelligence.com/index.html
Technically speaking, all the above URLs look different and there is a high possibility that the web server might return totally different content for any of the above urls. But in 99% of the cases the web server will return the same content for all of the above urls. Meaning that your actual site content get’s lost! The best way to avoid search engines from returning duplicate content, is by redirecting the IP address and non-www to the www hostnames as well as the /index.html page. Here’s how you can do it using a Mod Rewrite tool:
Rewrite Engine to:
# Redirect IP addresses and non-www to www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.SEOintelligence.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.SEOintelligence.com/$1 [R=301,L]
NOTE: In the above case when someone requests for the url http://SEOintelligence.com/index.html, then he/she will be redirected to the following url: http://www.SEOintelligence.com/index.html
# Redirect direct client requests for “<anything>/index.html” to “<anything>/”
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.html http://www.SEOintelligence.com/$1 [R=301,L]
NOTE: In the case mentioned above, if a visitor requests the url http://www.SEOintelligence.com/index.html then they would be redirected to http://www.SEOintelligence.com/.
Using Mod Rewrite For Search Engine Friendly URL’s
SEO is the holy grail of Internet marketing and hence it is important that you consider the fact that URL’s should be search engine friendly. If you are developing content that is going to be dynamic in nature a search engine friendly URL is important. Let’s look at an example: most designers, developers or website owners would vote URL-2 to be user friendly as well as search engine friendly as compared to URL-1. Here’s why:
Query String URL: http://www.SEOintelligence.com/widgets.php?cat=blue&page=1
Mod Rewrite URL: http://www. SEOintelligence.com/widgets/blue/page1.php
The second URL is not only user friendly but easy to remember and can be indexed properly.
Rewrite Engine On: Rewrite Rule ^widgets/ (.*)/page(.*)\.php/widgets.php?cat=$1&page=$2 [L]
Redirect Users To Relocated URL Using Mod Rewrite
There are times when you might need to redirect a relocated URL especially when you have changed your hosting services provider or hosting name/account. At the same time, you would want to re-capture your existing PageRank, retain visitors as well as link popularity. The old URL will only bring up a 404 (Not Found) error code. So what is the option? You can use mod rewrite to re-direct users to the relocated URL and also save your Page rankings as well as existing customers.
By Jeremy Hermanns | June 17, 2008 | Filed Under New Technology, SEO Tools
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