ReWrite php vars including wildcards

somsak · Joined: 05 May 2007 Posts: 3 Location: Thailand

I am in the process of finishing up a dynamic web and the only hurle left is to make the url s a little prettier.

Since I have heard that URLs with relevant words get better rank than numbers and codes I use list and $_GET directly on categories listed, subcategories and title such as

-www.mysite.com/article.php?category=My%20Category&subcat=In%20My$20category

i would like to rewrite this simply to be
-www.mysite/article/My_Category/In_my_category
if possible or
-www.mysite/article/category/My_Cayegory/subcat/In_my_category

My web server has rewrite enabled but on my windows system I cant get Apache rewrite to work so I would like to know what is the best way to do this before I start doing it.

Any help is appreciated since I ampretty new to these seo stuff
Thanx

dcz

And welcome Very Happy

On windows machine, you can use easyphp for example, you'd just need to proceed as follow to activate the mod_rewrite and be able to test all this locally :

To load mod Rewrite with Easyphp :

Code:

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

And :

Code:

AddModule mod_rewrite.c

Then, there are two separated part top work on to perform url rewriting.
First you need to actually rewrite the links, and this is to be done in the php files, and then to have these new url working, and this is the mod_rewrite part.
If we elaborate on this example of url : -www.mysite/article/My_Category/In_my_category
and assuming you won't have more than one sub level of categories, you could od the following :

In your .htaccess, add at the very bottom of it in case there are some other rewriterules (if not you' need to start the mod_rewrite before this) :

somsak · Joined: 05 May 2007 Posts: 3 Location: Thailand

Thank you for answering my questions.
I am have installed php 4.4.6 and Apache 2.0.59 om my windows computer since this is the version on the linux web server i am on. I do not find any
"LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so" in the Apache httpd conf file but the
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
is unquoted. But I cant get it work.
Have any suggestions or pointers for this ?

If I understand you right I need to rewrte my urls in PHP to get rid of the wildcard %20 (=whitespace)and then use .htaccess to remove the ? and &
and doing that is not really a problem
Thanx again

dcz

Well, the procedure to activate mod_rewrite is meant to work with easyphp, so I don't know about your set up.

I'm sure there are zillions of good tutorials to activate mod_rewrite on apache2 on the net, try a quick search.

Then, about titles, yes, it's better to avoid the url_encode() chars, the ones with %, like %20, %2F etc ...
Search Engines are able to deal with them, but still, I find it prettier without, more user friendly.

And since you need to re-build your links in order not to use the article.php?category=My%20Category&subcat=In%20My$20category anymore, you'd better as well format the titles nicely prior to injection.

Take a look at the demo forum, set it to advanced, a thread like : http://phpbb2.phpbb-seo.net/example-de-titre-mal-forme-vt85.html is a good example of the kind of filters required prior to title injection.

++

somsak · Joined: 05 May 2007 Posts: 3 Location: Thailand

Good point
again
Thanx a lot.
Beatiful forum.