Often described as “voodoo” by frustrated webmasters the use of mod_rewrite and htaccess files is one of the more advanced tasks a web developer has to face.
The good news is that unless you are looking for really advanced solutions you don’t have to fully understand how they work to use them on your website. Most of the htaccess and mod_rewrite tips on this page can simply be cut and pasted into a text file and uploaded to your server.
Over the last few years I’ve given the same htaccess tips to hundreds of webmasters so I decided to create a page with all the common uses.
htaccess is a configuration file that controls Apache web servers, mod_rewrite is a rewrite engine used by web servers to modify urls before they load.
The htaccess file is a text file called .htaccess – htaccess is the file extension, there is no filename. Normally it resides in the main root directory on your server but you can also create individual htaccess files for different directories on your site.
Canonicalization
The easiest htaccess trick is to make sure that your site doesn’t have any canonicalization issues on the homepage.
A lot of websites suffer from poor search engine rankings by having a number of different versions of the homepage, for example:
http://www.yoursite.com
http://yoursite.com
http://www.yoursite.com/index.html
http://yoursite.com/index.html
These pages are all seen as different urls, despite them having exactly the same content in most cases. Google has got better at deciding which version to use over the past 12 months but you can still run into problems.
To solve this issue simply add the following to your htaccess file:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.yoursite.com/ [R=301,L]
This will redirect all versions to http://www.yoursite.com
Changing html files to php
Sometimes you might have a static html website and need to use php code on the html pages. Rather than redirecting all your html pages to the equivalent php versions you simply need to tell your server to parse html files as if they were php.
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .html
This works with any files so if you want to create dynamic xml or asp files that behave like php files you simply edit the code as required:
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .xml
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .asp
Error pages
Custom error pages can be set up in cpanel fairly easily, if you want to create a custom error page in htaccess instead use this line:
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yoursite.com/404.php
Directory Indexes
To avoid Google indexing your directory indexes you might need to specify an index page for your directories. This is not required on some servers.
DirectoryIndex index.php3
My preference is to redirect the directory index page to either the homepage or another suitable page. For example www.yoursite.com/images/ can normally be redirected to www.yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com/forum/ can normally be redirected to www.yoursite.com/forum/index.php
Redirecting pages
A nice simple use of htaccess is to redirect one page to another:
redirect 301 /old-page.php http://www.yoursite.com/new-page.php
Sending your feed to Feedburner
If you want to switch your feed to the Feedburner service you will need to redirect your current feed to the new http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed location.
The redirect needs to apply to all users except the Feedburner spider:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
RewriteRule ^your-feed\.xml$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/your-feed [R,L]
Advanced hotlink protection
If you want to block other websites from hotlinking your images, but allow indexing of your images in the Google, Yahoo and MSN image search engines, you should use the code below:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://([^.]+\.)?yoursite\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !msn\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !yahoo\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/hotlinker\.gif$
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|png)$ /hotlinker.gif [NC,L]
The hotlinker.gif image is a custom image that you have created. I suggest using something like “This image was hotlinked from www.yoursite.com” and your logo.
My personal preference is to allow hotlinking but to implement a solution to make use of Google Images and hotlinkers to build links to your site.
Create beautiful url’s with mod_rewrite
The Apache rewrite engine is mainly used to turn dynamic url’s such as www.yoursite.com/product.php?id=123 into static and user friendly url’s such as www.yoursite.com/product/123
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^product/([^/\.]+)/?$ product.php?id=$1 [L]
Another example, rewrite from:
www.yoursite.com/script.php?product=123 to www.yoursite.com/cat/product/123/
RewriteRule cat/(.*)/(.*)/$ /script.php?$1=$2
Removing query strings
Some websites like to link to you by adding an query string, for example I could link to www.yoursite.com/index.php?source=blogstorm just so you know where your traffic came from. This creates duplicate content issue for your site so you really need to redirect back to your homepage:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^source= RewriteRule (.*) /$1? [R=301,L]
Further reading:
If you have any questions please post in the comments.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 38 comments… read them below or add one }
You’ve some great tips there,thanks Patrick!
Fantastic guide! You’ve made everything seem so simple. As you mentioned, htaccess has always been ‘voodoo’ for me
simple, elegant but rocks!
eh, it’s still pretty voodoo to me, even after reading lots of places, i still don’t seem to get it.
I’m trying to take something like
site.com/pages/page1.php
but make it really go to:
site.com/pages/index.php?id=1
and I have about 10 of those pages, each with different names like page2.php and page3.php. so I would need a rule for each one i think, but I just can’t seem to get it to work how I need… any suggestions or help?
Excellent advice – thanks.
One thing I cant fathom tho:
I have http://www.example.eu pointing to the same name servers as my main site at http://www.example.com
How would I write into the htaccess for anything coming to the .eu site to be rewritten to the .com site so as to avoid dupe issues?
Thanks
thnx for all these.
have a little problem with my site. The situation is: I have LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
in my httpd.conf,
the DocumentRoot is “/var/www/html”, and my site is under the html directory, that means /var/www/html/mysite/,
I put .htaccess file these directives:
php_value error_reporting 7
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)/(.*)?$ /index.php?module=item&action=show_item_decr&item_id=$1
but it seems that it doesn’t work ! it gives me a 404 page, and even if I put one of your directives it doesn’t work , can you help please ! is there anything I have to add ! thnx !
When I use
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^source= RewriteRule (.*) /$1? [R=301,L]
I get a 500 server error.
Am I not using it right?
Thanks for the useful tips!
Cheers Patrick. I’ll mention this article on my latest blog post.
dew: eh, it’s still pretty voodoo to me, even after reading lots of places, i still don’t seem to get it.
Apache mod_rewrite IS voodoo. That’s why it seems like voodoo to you.
It even says so in the official documentation. (Although they removed that quote from the 2.0 docs, mod_rewrite is still the same, and still voodoo.)
Very good tips. I spent one whole morning on .htaccess and got it done only when I found this article.
You might enjoy checking out the .htaccess guides here too.
Nice and simple tutorial, thanks!
Thanks for the tutorial, Patrick
I used it to redirect an old static site to a Wordpress site. I discovered some extra bits along the way that might be useful -
- If you’re using WP permalinks, WP adds some lines to htaccess. make sure you put additional stuff outside the code block that WP adds. Otherwise it may get overwritten next time WP writes to htaccess.
- Put your redirects before the code that WP adds, so that they are processed before control is passed to WP
- If there are spaces in the old URLs, put quotes around them. Eg.
redirect 301 "/old page.htm" http://www.mysite.com/newpage(NB. there is a WP plugin called “Redirection” but I wanted to learn about htaccess, and keep my list of plugins as short as possible!)
Thanks for a great site, good to read a UK perpsective on SEO stuff!
Cheers, Jon
Wow… that’s a great artical. You have no idea how many different versions of rewrites I have crawled through…. none of them worked…. until yours. I am more than grateful!
I have a question though. Windows live has indexed http://www.mysite.ie/?
How or why I don’t know but I’d like to get rid of it. I have not got my head around regex yet and can’t work it out… I ended up with a loop when I tried to modify your QUERY_STRING source= (which was absolutely ideal for getting rid of my index.php?url=home problem.. Thanks again).
While I owe you big time already I’d appreciate any help you could offer with this… be it a solution or where to look for one… I’m stumped!
You have my site address and email address should you need them.
Thanks again for your brilliant page.
Ian.
Find me on Twitter
I suggest just redirecting it in your domain registrar control panel rather than using htaccess.
More comments from Patrick Altofthi mr Patrick Altoft,
Thank you i am new to htaccess. Very help ful for your wonderful tips
Great info. One issue with the Canonicalization script. The url’s and directory’s should end with a trailing slash.
http://www.yoursite.com/
http://www.yoursite.com/directory/
It will save an extra query on your web server and make it just a tad faster.
Let me know if you modify that, so I can ad it to my htaccess file.
Thanks for the tips I’m still struggling with some rewriting but i’m certainly getting better!
good article
Very useful tutorial! It’s easy to learn how to make clean and nice urls. Thank you for your tutorial, Patrick Altoft.
I am trying to optimise my football team’s website. The player profile pages url is:
/players.php?player=lukefretwell
I managed to write the a rule so if you type /player-lukefretwell you will go to /players.php?player=lukefretwell while keeping /player-lukefretwell.
But I also want it so that if you type /players.php?player=lukefretwell the address bar changes to /player-lukefretwell and still go to /players.php?player=lukefretwell
My reason for wanting to do this is that I am worried that google will index both types of url, then this would dilute the pages and also flag up duplicate content.
Am I wrong in understanding that the two can both be indexed. If I am right to worry is it possible to do a rule to just rewrite what is seen in the address bar?
Find me on Twitter
Luke you do need to write a rule to redirect. If you can’t figure it out in htaccess then create a copy of players.php and call it players2.php and use this as the script to generate your /player-lukefretwell pages. Now change your players.php to use a php redirect at the top which points to /player-$player
More comments from Patrick AltoftNice tutorial. Very simple for me, thanks…
Find me on StumbleUpon | Twitter
Solid write up and extremely useful. Thanks Patrick!
More comments from richardbaxterseoI have been banging my head against the wall to do what I believe is a simple task. My client need me to simplify a url:
FROM:
http://hhhh.com/saccny/index.php?pageRef=chairmanandvicechairmen
TO:
http://hhhh/saccny/Board_of_Directors
I don’t need it to automate for the entire site and I cannot afford to have the php code rewritten. I am happy to add a string to the .htaccess for each url I need changed. Is this difficult to do? It is not a redirect because http://hhhh/saccny/Board_of_Directors does not really exist.
Find me on Twitter
I’ve also read that google treats domains with a trailing slash (ie, http://domain.com/ and http://domain.com ) as two different websites, as well as http://www.domain.com/ and http://www.domain.com WITHOUT the trailing slash,so there’s even more url bleeding?
More comments from sandiegowebdesignerHi there,
If I do a mod rewrite do I then need to do a 301 redirect to so there is no duplicate content?
Thanks in advance.
Jeff
Help me to create file .HTACCESS for apache (php website) for
http://www.vietnamdhtravel.com
Thank you so much
Thanks for making these so easy.
Hi Patrick… After reading this and other articles on net I am able to
redirect pages http://www.asd.com/case/20-2040 to pages like http://www.asd.com/xyz.php
using
RewriteRule ^case/([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{4}) xyz.php [NC]
but what is happening is that it is not taking css .
Further more if I am using
RewriteRule ^case/([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{4}) http://www.asd.com/xyz.php [NC]
It works fine but the url in address bar changes…..
Can you solve my problem.thnx in advance
Hi Paras, What is happening there is that your page is looking for the CSS in the wrong folder. You have redirected to a folder that is up a level. By changing the path of your CSS file to the root directory you should be able to fix it. This depends on the file structure of your hosting provider. Ask them for the path to your root directory.
Alternatively you could try adding ../ before your path. The two dots signify going up a level in the directory.
Hope that helps.
Ian.
if all of u wanna mod_rewrite url
u should change url internal link at ur php/script
then modif ur htaccess
suwun
Hi Patrick
Surfing the web certainly comes up trumps from time to time. I only recently discovered the power of htaccess and the addition of nofollow code to help prevent loosing link juice. I appreciate the depth of your post.
Regards
Kerry
Thanks! I was looking for a good hotlink protection.
Hi Guys,
It still amazes me to this day just how much developers dislike working on mod_rewrites or htaccess files their is so much useful information regarding this stuff should make things straight forward.
Great post Patrick
I had to do this a couple of weeks ago while using FTP Core. This is the best way I have seen it explained for people yet. I am going to make a post on one of my sites linking back to this as there aren't a lot of people out there explaining it like you have. Thanks for the great info as always Pat.
I still don't understand why people would want to stop hot linking images. Isn't that this some kind of exposure to your web? I mean, if people in the forum talk about image that we post and they also point the source, wouldn't be great?
If I'm understanding you correctly, I personally don't mind people using my images "if" given a link back. However I'm in online gaming industry which attracts dodgy webmasters who scrap your source code and hotlink to images.
These creeps give no recognition for the image, which can add up to gigs of bandwidth a month being stolen. It's unfortunate that honest webmasters these days have to protect their content, images and basically anything on their site from being scrapped.
Just as piece of free seo advice, if your site uses an rss/atom feed…only post extracts to it, don't post full text content. It makes it less attractive to scrappers.
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