Urls rewriting "how to" with .htaccess

[mozllo]

hi,

Please i would need advices (links, tips, tool:generator ?) regarding url rewriting through .htaccess (newbee about it).

It's a "refurbishing" website case  , the domain doesn't change. But the CMS does !

I've got a list of urls (800) with which i don't want to loose rankings on :

Here the type of old url syntax :

http://www.mydomain.com/home/newscontent.asp?id=1133

Here the new url type would be:

http://www.mydomain.com/name-of-the-article
or/and
http://www.mydomain.com/category/Page-2

Tks a lot...

[baptisteplace]

Hi mozllo,

You won't be able to create a .htaccess for such urls, because the original url only has the ID of the article and you want the name of the article in the new url. This requires database access to know the new url.

I would suggest to put in your htaccess file :

RewriteRule ^home/newscotnent.asp?id=([0-9]+) redirect.php?id=$1 [L]

Edit : see good rule below

The redirect.php file will load the article (or category as I understood) and do a 301 to the new url.

[dephelis]

Hi,

From the .asp in the sample URLs I'm guessing you're hosted on Windows, if that's the case you'll need to get a rewrite mod for IIS such as ISAPI Rewrite 3. We've been using it for about 5 years now and it performs well. Their site has documentation that shows how it works.

You'll need to learn about regex expressions and a tool like Regex Buddy might be helpful.

I'm not aware of an tools that can automate generation, and I think that in your case you're going to need to do some manual work to set it up.

First you'll need a way of linking the old URLs to the new ones. Given the information you've provided, it's not clear how you'll be able to do this, so I'll make an assumption.

Assuming that name-of-the-article is the same as the title of newscontent.asp?id=1133, you'll need to generate a list, in excel for example, that lists the old contentid and the title of that document. You can then use formulae/macros to generate the rewrite rules which you would enter in the .htaccess file.

If you don't have a record of the id = title relationship in your old cms database (assumption!) then you might be able to do it by crawling the old site with a crawling program, exporting the data and then manipulating it. Otherwise you'll have to do it all by hand.

Rewrite rules generally take the form:

RewriteRule oldpageaddress newpageaddress [flags]

You'll also need to use the RewriteCond in order to base the rule on the querystring.

So for your example;

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=1133$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^newscontent.asp$ ^name-of-the-article$ [L,R=301]

You'd then need to repeat those two statements for each page you want to redirect.

[dephelis]

He'll need to add [L,R=301] at the end instead of just [L]. IIRC default behaviour is a 302 redirect.

You also can't reference a querystring in the RewriteRule, you have to use RewriteCond.

[baptisteplace]

True ! The good syntax is :

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}  ^/home/newscontent.asp
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} id=([0-9]+)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ redirect.php?id=%1 [L]

[dephelis]

But only if he's moved from Windows IIS hosting to Linux or Windows + PHP!

[baptisteplace]

That's right but htaccess was asked. Thumbed up your answer so it goes first

[dephelis]

I'll return the favour if it turns out he has moved from IIS

[mozllo]

Hi,

Tks to you both Damiens Phillips and Baptiste placé.

But it seems to be a bit confusing for me for 2 reasons : language + technical knowledge !
I confirm that i'll move from windows platform to linux one.

So if i understand :

1/ - htaccess is possible but where will it be located ? I assume at the root of the old platform (windows here..).

2/ - I'll have to crawl each article in order to get each id (by the way, have you got any crawler tool to advise ?)

3/ - For each of these urls i'll have to write such syntax :

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=1133$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^newscontent.asp$ ^name-of-the-article$ [L,R=301]

4/ ...800 times ? Or is there a way to tell on 1 line like :
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=1133$ + ^id=1134$ + ^id=1197$ ...... [NC]

Tks a lot again

[baptisteplace]

Can you be a bit more precise about the new url ? Does every old article with id has to 301 to a page with a unique name ?

[mozllo]

Tks to you both  Baptiste placé Damiens Phillips and.

What  do you mean when you say :

"The redirect.php file will load the article (or category as I understood) and do a 301 to the new url."

Is it en .htaccess file to create or a dedicated file.php , or both (redirect.php) ?

Yes, i'll all have to transfer each old article  and i'll give them an unique urls per article..hope that reply your question !

[baptisteplace]

To be clear about the different roles of the files in my solution, the .htaccess file will redirect every old url (whatever the id is) to a redirect script written in php.

This script will get the old url Id, load the article (to get the article name) and then redirect 301 to the new url. Only in php can you access the database.

Damien gave another solution, only based on htaccess. You have to write (or generate with code / software) 800 redirect directive for the htaccess file.

[dephelis]

1. .htaccess won't exist on the windows platform unless you installed a rewrite mod on the windows server. If you did then the .htaccesswill be in the root folder of the website (usually) you should check the documentation of the rewrite mod to confirm that.

2. If you have a windows PC then Xenu's Link Sleuth should be able to crawl the old site, you can then extract the information from the files that xenu can export.

3/4. If every unique id needs to get mapped to a unique url then yes, 800 times it is. If you have multiple ids that go to the same page you could do:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=113[3-8]$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^newscontent.asp$ ^name-of-the-article$ [L,R=301]

All ids from  1133 to 1138 will now redirect to the same page, you'll have to work out the regexs though.

[mozllo]

Tks again, so (sorry to repeat)

• your  solution : 1 .htaccess + redirect.php : located at the root of windows platform

• Damien's : 1 .htaccess :located at the root of windows platform

Is that correct ?

[dephelis]

To be honest, this is the solution I'd go for.

Mozollo, was your old site database driven?

Are you using the old article titles as the new page names?

If the answer is no to either of these, then the end result is you will have to manual map id to page name for each of the 800 pages you want to keep.

[mozllo]

I'd say yes for the first one and for sure no for the second one...:)

[dephelis]

OK in that case it simplifies things a bit.

In order to do any redirection from id=1136 to unique-article-name you will haveto create the mappings entirely manually.

The two solutions provided are:
Baptiste: On the new linux hosting set up an .htaccess file in the root of the site directory that redirects all id=xxxx requests to a redirect.php file on your server. The redirect.php file will need to interrogate a database with a table of the mappings and automatically redirect to the correct page via php scripting.

Mine: essentially the same as Baptiste's proposal, except that you don't interrogate the database, all the redirections are done using the htaccess file which contains all the mappings.

Either way you will need to manually create the mappings yourself, either in the database or in the htaccess file.

EDIT: Just had a thought, are the page titles of the articles the same between the new site and the old? If they are then you could crawl both sites with Xenu and then use vlookups in excel (or similar) to semi-automatically create your mapping of id = unique-article-name.

[baptisteplace]

As you have only 800 urls, I agree with Damien, you should generate an associative array in pure php, associating every ID with the new url.

The redirect script will only test if the ID is an array key, if it is you 301 to the new url. Otherwise, display a 404 page.

[mozllo]

Many tks for all these explanations..

So, in fact, lazily speaking, i would say that the .htaccess file solution give less work to do (no redirection script) and seems to be quite easy to make (excepting syntax inside .htaccess), so i 'll go for Damien's ..but i need credentials to install it.

Otherwise, if i don't, I'd go for Baptiste's...

Tks a lot...

[mozllo]

Good idea..i'll to make it so , and use excel function.....tks