From the posts done by Nintendo I have some mode rewrite. Thanx Nintendo My current url is domain.com/cat=3 and I have been able to turn this into domain.com/cat-3.html I was wondering how it is possible to turn it into domain.com/cars/ where cars is the title of cat=3?
You first have to set up the new rewrite rule which would probably be almost the same as your current one, note this requires category names to only have letters, number, hyphens and underscores, more characters can be added if needed: RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^([a-z0-9_-]+)/?$ index.php?cat=$1 [NC,L] Then, in your index.php, you will need a script that queries the database to get the category ID from the category name. I need to know more about your script though before being of more help with this step. Of course, if the script is small or well written, you can just modify the parts that involve the "cat" variable in the URL so you don't need an extra SQL query everytime.
What software are you using? Also, just wanted to note that the only advantage of rewriting is that it looks nice. Search engines can index dynamic urls perfectly fine.
Isn't that a good enough reason anyway? Besides, what he wants will result in a keyword in the URL instead of an ID, so regardless of whether search engines index it, it will still be of advantage.
Not really, a pretty url doesn't change functionality and makes very little difference for the end-user. Yes, keywords in the url is an advantage, but that's assuming that the keywords are actually relevant to the site. An address of http://www.yourdomain.com/cars/help-14532/ is no more useful to a search engine than http://www.yourdomain.com/showthread.php?p=14532 All rewriting does is use up more resources.
I am using wordpress with the wp e-commerce plugin. Wordpress itself makes great search engine friendly urls, but the plugin doesn't.
How about we call them simple URLs, not pretty ones And it changes usability at least... not everyone knows what the question marks are for and rewritten URLs can be hand edited more easily. Why would a URL have "cars" in it if the website is not about cars? If that's not what you meant, than there is no reason why "cars" is not a relevant keyword, validating the assumption. You said yourself that it is an advantage if it is relevant. And in this case it is, category names describe the content of the page, so the category name is definitely relevant. It doesn't seem to need much work to change the plugin so it does. For this case, I think you only need a few edits of display-items.php. Just search for the links involving catid= for a start.
I'll need to look into exactly how that plugin works. What do the urls look like? Not really, it's not used in practical day-to-day use. The that I was referring to was the "/help-14532/". That is no more use than "p=14532". Look at Digital Point, for instance, they don't use rewritten urls here but that hasn't exactly hurt the site. Has it? Yes, but it really won't help you much. It may slightly increase your ranking for the keyword "cars" but, quite frankly, search engines spider content not urls. You can stuff as many keywords into the url as you want, but that won't give you a high ranking if there aren't decent numbers of inbound links and good content.
path/to/script/?catid=x&page=n The links are generated by a few functions so the manual editing of links to use the new URLs is not a burden. Sorry... that comment just seems random, doesn't seem to make any sense when in response to anything I said. There is a difference between trivial changes such as /3/ -> id=3 and changes such as cat=keyword -> cat=n. Suppose they use /forums/topic-title instead of just the ID for the forums, that would make a difference. I've been a web developer for years and have only found this site last month. Maybe it has hurt the site, or not let it become as effective as it could be Obviously there is more to SEO than a URL, bur every bit helps. Frankly, one of the benefits (SEO, usability, "prettiness") is enough for me to decide to use it, let alone all of them!
What I meant, is that people don't usually manually type in address (I certainly don't) and a keyword-filled address is actually longer! The largest forum and fastest forum on the internet uses non-rewritten urls. http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/ Then you're welcome to use it, as long as I don't have to share a server with you
Not typing the whole URL, but changing one bit for example. I admit that I don't do it much since getting broadband though. So if not for editing the URLs by hand, then it is still more usable in that when you can identify the page easier, such as when you have a few tabs open, links to the page from other sites are more clear etc. Good on em? But then, forums are not the best candidates for this. Even so, look at www.webmasterworld.com , I am sure their use of rewritten URLs helps support why so many google searches I do lead me there. Nice to see we are both doing this with some good humour PS. JohnBurk, sorry for taking over your thread! Still waiting on a response from you though.
Hi Krt, Sorry I was away and had no internet access. The URL look like this http://www.domain.com/shop/?category=1 and for every category there is a different number. Lets say these are the categories, 1 = books 2 = pens 3 = phones How can the moderewrite be done to make it look like http://www.domain.com/shop/books/
in wordpress you should have a similar option. In the admin panel login + goto options -> permalinks -> select custom, and in the custom strucure add something like: /%post_id%/%category%/%postname%.html Code (markup): then at the bottom it should generate what you should write to your site .htaccess something like: < IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] </IfModule> Code (markup):
@pixelcoder, What you suggested is the standaard option in wordpress, but does not work with this plugin. Thus does not solve the problem.