GoDaddy Hosting and Search Engine URL's

I've recently put up a new site, and had real trouble trying to get search engine friendly URL's working.

The following URL,

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?view=5

isn't very nice for search engines, as they tend to ignore the variable part, just leaving

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php 

to be indexed! This is because they don't want to index what they deem is dynamic content (signified by the variables).

The solution, if you can configure it on your host is to change the URL to

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php/view/5

or, even better

http://www.yoursite.com/view/5

This requires a combination of Apache configuration (using mod_rewrite) and PHP code to understand the new variables.

If your host doesn't have mod_rewrite, then your pretty much out of luck. Either move, or badger them to death to install it.

Apache Configuration

First you need to create a file call .htaccess (note the period in front of the file name).

Here's what I've got in the file.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteOptions MaxRedirects=10
RewriteCond $1 !^(favicon.ico|index\.php|inc|images|css|robots\.txt)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?$1 [L]

Break it down

RewriteEngine on

This turns on the Apache rewrite engine, to allow the incoming URL (/view/5) to be turned into another URL (index.php?/view/5).

RewriteOptions MaxRedirects=10

Sets the maximum redirects, so that we don't inadvertently end up in a loop.

RewriteCond $1 !^(favicon.ico|index\.php|mailer\.php|inc|images|css|robots\.txt)

The guts. This says that if the URL doesn't contains:

 favicon.ico
 index.php
 mailer.php
 inc
 images
 css
 robots.txt

then follow the next rule. You'd add any other files here. For php files in directories, you only need to add the directory name. For example, if you had http://www.yoursite.com/app/index.php, you could just add the app name into the list above. Don't forget to escape the periods in filenames!

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?$1 [L]

The rule. It takes what ever was entered as the URL and converts it to the new format. The new format is not seen by the user. They continue to see http://www.yoursite.com/view/5.

So now, instead of having http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?view=5, I have http://www.yoursite.com/view/5. The search engine can know successfully spider your site, without knowing that it's dynamically generated!

PHP Code

In PHP, the script is know being called as index.php?view/5

To get hold of the string, just use

$actionPath = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']

The variable $actionPath will know contain the string "view/5".

$actions = split("/", $actionPath)

You will now have an array $actions, which will show

Array {
 [0] = "view"
 [1] = "5"
 }

In your script you can now decide what to process as before!

Hope this help someone out there.

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