7 Responses to “Using .htaccess to make search engine-friendly URLs – “There is no spoon””

1. Jere Matlock Says:
   November 15th, 2009 at 5:40 pm

   Wow thanks a lot for your reply, not used to getting feedback this fast, and such excellent one too.

   This is pretty much exactly what I was looking for. I guess any further information, for example on dynamic generation of the .htaccess files
   should be available via google.

   Thanks again,

   -Jan

2. Jim Gaudet Says:
   December 8th, 2009 at 1:40 pm

   Thanks for the info, but I have a different question more database related. I would like to have the url like this;

   domain.com/products/category/product-title

   category and product-title with be tables in the database. How can I get it to search the database for the proper category and product?

   How could I get the .htaccess file to forward the variables to the PHP page,which can search for the category and product-title, then generate the page?

   Thanks in advance,

   Jim

3. Jere Matlock Says:
   December 8th, 2009 at 3:03 pm

   If you want to have your website using page names something like this:

   http://www.hubcaps.com/dodge/66-valiant-hubcaps

   that’s fairly easy to set up using a RewriteRule in .htaccess

   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteRule ^dodge/66-valiant.php /display.php?category=dodge&year=66&model=valiant [L]

4. Mark Says:
   February 19th, 2010 at 12:33 am

   This is great. Thank you.

   It obviously allows people to get routed to the right part of your database but how does a search engine know what to look for? Does it spider the .htaccess file?

5. Jere Matlock Says:
   February 20th, 2010 at 11:19 pm

   No – Google never sees the .htaccess file (it’s inaccessible through normal browsing).

   Instead, when Google requests the page, in much the same fashion as a person browsing the page would request it, the server creates it “on the fly” and gives it to Google based on the action of Google requesting the page. It’s fast and it works. This is how to show elegant, search-engine-friendly URLs while having the actual content come from a database by using question marks, product ids, category ids, and so on. In practice, it works great!

6. abbas Says:
   February 23rd, 2010 at 6:00 am

   hi
   i have any dynamic page like this in my site:
   http://mirsoft.net/detail.php?siteid=433

   how can i change to this : http://mirsoft.net/detail-433.html by .htaccess file.

   thanks.

7. Jere Matlock Says:
   February 23rd, 2010 at 10:39 am

   Hi, Abbas -

   Test this code in your .htaccess file, to see if it works:

   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteRule ^detail-433.htm /detail.php?siteid=433 [L]

   —————-

   Here are some tutorials on using .htaccess that you may find useful:

   http://softexpert.wordpress.com/2007/10/15/learn-htaccess-in-10-minutes/

   http://www.thejackol.com/htaccess-cheatsheet/

   http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess.shtml

   Good luck!

   Best,

   Jere Matlock

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