URLs that search engine bots can follow and index are crucial for any site to have, if they want any luck in whatever industry they're in. This article will simply get you started on the concept by introducing you to mod_rewrite, a must have.

http://www.iceteks.com/articles.php/sefriendlylinks/1

Very interesting article, somehow I knew it would eventually involve .htaccess but the step by step walkthrough was very useful.

I'm a little confused as to how this helps search engines though. All the non search engine friendly URL's would be changed but wouldn't they still be presented to the bot as get variables in the body of the forum/blog/whatever and so never looked at anyway?

Technically yes, but I think bots purposely ingore these type of urls. But they can follow them like normal urls, they just don't... well not much, since they do occasionaly follow since the article system here used to use the old ones and some articles did get indexed, but with this new system it's more effective.

So to get this to work you couldn't just throw a .htaccess file in at the root of your forum but would need to change how the links are presented in the page before this would work.

Yes you have to change the templates to point to the new urls.

Yeah so in the templates it has to point to the "good" urls otherwise search engines won't know they exist.

Apache is still much easier (and safer) so i'd just switch to apache, you can stay with windows as OS, just put apache and disable IIS.

Oh it's a hosting company. hmmm, I'd switch to linux based hosting though, makes so much things easier (and more secure, and more reliable).

Personally, I'd leave a linux box open to public with a blank root password before installing IIS on a server. Both bad security practises.

Hi, i'm trying with this sistem because i've since i've implemented my new portal that use this style of url index.php?pagina=XXXXX i've lost my pagerank because of that, before it was 5 now it's 1 or 0...

i've tried but with this .htaccess:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*) index.php?pagina=$1

and this php:
<?php
$variable = $_GET['pagina'];
echo $variable;
?>

going to this url:
http://www.redr2k.com/paginas/test

i always get 'index.php' and it should be 'test'

I hope you can hel me out.

Thanks.

Hi, i managed to make it work...ok sort of.
I've put in the root the .htaccess with this.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^paginas/(.*) index.php?pagina=$1

And now it works fine.

http://www.redr2k.com/paginas/Superman_Returns
http://www.redr2k.com/paginas/Smallville

Another thing, in my other message, when the .htacces was in "paginas" folder i arrived to make it work this way, but i didn't like the idea.

RewriteRule ^paginas_(.*) index.php?pagina=$1
http://www.redr2k.com/paginas/paginas_Smallville

Thanks anyway, even if i didn't get an answer to my post, everything works fine.

Eduardo

good to know it works!

“Clean URLs” are about more than search-engine optimisation. They also make your site more usable. After all, which would you rather type:

The clean one has less characters and a more natural construction, meaning less chance of mistakes. You also no longer use file extensions in your URL. They’ll only confuse normal users, and what if you decide to use something other than PHP in the future? You could associate .php with something else, but…eww.

Or do like I did for my sig and make php files .jpg.