help w/ advanced rewrite htaccess rules

PhotonLight · Joined: 02 Jun 2006 Posts: 5 Location: Eugene, OR, USA

Hi guys, I've actually got two questions here.

1. I have recently (within the last couple weeks) moved my forum from a subdirectory on my main site (http://www.photonlight.com/forum/) to it's own subdomain, (http://forum.photonlight.com). The old forum used static URLs in the Able2Know format and with the new forum I have switched to phpBB SEO advanced mod rewrite. For the htaccess file in the old forum's directory I have simply added a permanent redirect to send everything to the new subdomain. In the htaccess file for the subdomain I have added all of the mod rewrite rules for both the phpBB SEO advanced mod rewrite and also the rules from Able2Know so that any of the old URLs that are being redirected to the subdomain still point to the correct topics in the forum. So, everything functions just fine. I'm just concerned about page rank & re-indexing the new pages now.

So since I am using the full keyword URLs from advanced mod rewrite, am I correct in assuming that there is no way to transfer pagerank & such to the new URLs? I would think that in order to give a proper 301 redirect you would have to be able to query the database and find the actual topic title to insert in the redirected URL which I would guess is way outside the scope of a simple htaccess file. I don't think this is really a serious issue for me since according to google the only outside link I have to the forum just points to index.php, but I wanted to bring this up just in case I'm missing something.

2. With about 700 pages from the new forum indexed so far, I am noticing that every page in google's index has the ?p=xxx at the end. For example, instead of indexing forum.photonlight.com/brightness-vp500.html, the page showing up in the index is forum.photonlight.com/brightness-vp500.html?p=500. I don't know where google is finding links with the URLs written like this since everything in my sitemaps & the links in the forum itself don't show the query string at the end. I have added "Disallow: /*.html?" to the last line of my robots.txt file in an attempt to force google into indexing the URLs without the query string (thinking that maybe since it was getting the query string versions it was skipping over the non-query-string version of the page as duplicate content), but Google still seems to only be finding the pages with the query string at the end. Any ideas what could be causing this?

How would I write an htaccess rule to permanently redirect any URL ending with "...vp[xxx].html?p=[xxx]" to just "...vp[xxx].html" without the query string? Or is this even the best solution?

Thanks in advance for any help with this.

dcz

For your first question, could you send us the code you used to redirect from your domain to your sub-domain.

Actually, this could be the reason why you get these stranges additional vars in your URLs, because the phpBB SEO advanced mod Rewrite is perfectly working on your forum.

Then, it is true it is impossible to redirect from static to dynamic mod Rewritten URL with the .htaccess. Actually we could do it in the php files, I think I'll soon release a redirection mod for such cases.

So please post all your .htaccess and we'll see if we want to keep the old abl2know redirections or not.

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