Best of luck to you

I am working in .net … Could you please help me how can I make the search engine friendly URLs without making HTML pages for them please
..IF you find any answer then please mail me at:

Archanazohns@gmail.com

Yes, we went that route, too. We tried for a week to get our .htaccess file to do a lookup (which it is supposed to be able to do) but we could NOT get it to work on our server, despite involving Tier II tech support and calling in an outside “expert”. Nothing doing! So we had to regroup. They say “Necessity is the mother of invention” but I think it is more like “Necessity is the mother of circumvention” in this case.

Best,

Jere

I have looked for how to do what you describe in your last comment for 3 weeks with no luck. I never though it would be as easy as routing through a PHP script! I was trying to figure out a way to get .htaccess to read a database ( hits forehead with palm ).

Thanks a lot!!

If you need to set this up, you need someone to do it who knows what they are doing. It’s not for the faint of heart.

Here’s an example: We had a “media. website. com” sub-domain, which was being hosted on another server. We consolidated hosting and moved all of the “media” content over to a blog, at “blog. website. com”

In the “media” folder, we put an .htaccess with this code in it:

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^media.website.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/dispatcher.php
RewriteRule (.*) /dispatcher.php?file=$1 [R=301,L,QSA]

That’s what does the “heavy lifting” for us.

——————–

Then we have in “dispatcher.php” the following code to pull apart the pieces of the URI being requested, and look for it in the little table in the database with the old and new page names in it, and then set the location. The result is a clean shift from one URL to another, with a 301 code sent and the right URI being served for the request. Note that this replaces about 400 lines of .htaccess file.

$request = $_SERVER[REQUEST_URI];
$request = trim($request);
$uriparts = explode('?', $request);
$vars = explode('&', $uriparts);
if ($uriparts[1])
{
parse_str($uriparts[1], $vars);
}

header("Location: http : / /blog. thiswebsite. com/default-page.php");
} */

No, you don’t have to do this by hand for each entry.

When you have a very large, very active database-driven site, it is best to set up something we have given the name of “dispatcher”.

Basically, you route the traffic through to a php file called dispatcher.php, that does a lookup in a mySQL database and provides the appropriate name.

We just did this for a big media room (call it media.website.com) with several thousand pages, which we routed over to a blog (blog.website.com). Most of the pages of the media room were moved, but not all of them. Requests for those pages that were not moved are served a generic page with a 301 code. Requests for pages that were moved are given a 301 redirect to the exact page name in the blog that we want to serve up instead.

To give credit where it is due, we “lifted” this system from the xCart shopping cart, which uses a file called “dispatcher.php” to do exactly the same thing. That’s how it makes search-engine-friendly URLs.

Dispatcher.php, when called by the htaccess file, becomes part of the process of determining the page name to be displayed. The .htaccess file sends all traffic to it, it does a lookup in the database, finds the right file name, and sets the “location”. It’s much, much faster than trying to do all this redirection through the .htaccess file.

So the thing to do is make a search-engine-friendly URL for any page that you create (even if it is done automatically) and store that in a database table, then use the dispatcher.php file to go get that file name and serve it up instead of the funky variable-filled URL that is not friendly to the search engines.

If you need more help on this, we would be happy to consult with you on it. Contact me directly for a free initial consultation.

Great tut, but all the time I’m reading your post and Q&A I have a question I still am very keen to confirm.. lets take the following case for example;
————————————–
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]
————————————–
so the above solution is just for id number 433… does that mean we have to do this for every id 1 to 433? And what about the future where it is quite possible for ids to go up all the way to thousands.. and what if the website gets 10 new ids an hour, do we manually create a mod rewrite for each new id? Wouldn’t that take just take up all of our time?

I’ve run into this before.

Try setting the “base” HTML command within cat.php.

Or try setting up a Rewrite Rule that sends the “include” request to the correct folder.

Note: You can have multiple .htaccess files within the different folders on your server at different levels on the server.

Best,

Jere Matlock