Dale's Weblog

mod_rewrite

Here google bot, now you can index me!

Let me try and explain what rewriting is:

mod_rewrite is *some what* like DNS in a way.

For example if you type http://www.google.com your computer will look up the ip address for google and then load the page.
Mod_rewrite looks at the url that the user entered and outputs something.

So the user enters:
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/newsid/91#comments
My website outputs:
http://blog.dalegroup.net/index.php?newsid=91#comments
Yet the user doesn’t see this.

Like DNS you don’t see the IP address just the "mask".

That is just a basic example. mod_rewrite is much more/different than that. But hopefully you understand.

Now why is this a good thing? Well google, yahoo and any other bots have issues with ?= and all that stuff meaning that as until now they would have only indexed the front page of this site. Now since my urls don’t have ?= etc google should index them and therefore have a hard linked url to that news item. Sweet :)

For anyone who wants to try this on their site the code I use is here:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^archive/blog/newsid/([^/]+)$ /?newsid=$1
RewriteRule ^archive/blog/newsid/([^/]+)/$ /?newsid=$1

</IfModule>

If you want me to explain it, email me :)

EDIT: If you have any problems posting comments etc because of the new setup please do let me know. *hint* post something to test it ;)

EDIT2: I also should thank wordpress for giving me the idea. Although I’m not a fan of third party blogging scripts they have some great developers and features.