Htaccess Rewrites for Moving Urls

This is part 2 of the exhaustive Htaccess Tutorial. I realized it was so lengthy that search engines and visitors were having real problems with it, so I moved half of it here. But this gave me the opportunity to add a ton of new stuff that I hadn't been able to add to the main htaccess tutorial. And now this new part 2 is already twice as big as the original! To sum up, this is a work in progress.

Moving Half of Original Tutorial to a new URL - SEO Rewriting

Well, the original tutorial was at /htaccess/apache-htaccess.html, but it was such a huge article that search engines were dropping it! So I split it into 3 new urls.

1. /htaccess/htaccess.html - 1
2. /htaccess/htaccess-rewrites.html - Rewrites
3. /htaccess/apache-htaccess-2.html - Part 2

The /htaccess/apache-htaccess-2.html is a lot of unfinished new stuff, and the /htaccess/htaccess-rewrites.html (this very page) still needs to be split several times to get the filesize down.

301 Link Juice

The /apache-htaccess.html url has been around since 2006, and it was full of original ideas and examples for using htaccess. Almost every htaccess guide or tutorial published since then has many of the examples and ideas from that tutorial, (I encourage people to modify and republish everything on this site according to copyright). I know it, the authors sometimes know it, but the main point is Google for sure knows it. That's the beauty of creating unique content, Google sees that. So that /apache-htaccess.html link has extreme link juice, from all the sites, books, papers, and presentations that have linked to it since 2006.

Filesize Is important

I like to use my blog as a way to keep notes about my research organized, and I am extremely good at doing research, unfortunately, that means I have a huge article. The filesize for the html alone is larger than all the other resources like javascript and images, combined.

• So that means it is very difficult to view on a mobile device, or a slow connection.
• For google-bot and other search engine crawlers and robots, this is a huge problem (I made a big mistake letting it get that size).
• The robot has to parse an enormous single html file, containing hundreds/thousands of external and internal links, and its such an issue they can decide to just skip indexing that url until the filesize is manageable.
• Once again, it's all about the human experience, a huge single file is not good for anyone who isn't printing it out to read offline.

Starting Fresh without losing juice

So since the page wasn't being indexed much since it was so huge, I decided to split up the content into new separate urls and utilize a 301 Redirect to transfer all the link juice from /apache-htaccess.html to /htaccess.html.

301 Redirect Timeline

1. Now, the idea is to take the first pages from the original multi-page guide, do a little improvement on that content, and save it to the new url /htaccess.html.
2. Then just continue taking the next page from the remaining original guide and creating new pages using the original links structure. /apache-htaccess-2.html, /apache-htaccess-3.html, etc.. This is a secondary backup to the new /htaccess.html url, which will receive the 301 link juice from the old url, but these secondary pages will help keep the links on external sites good.
3. Then, I setup a 301 Redirect in my .htaccess file to redirect the old url to the new /htaccess.html url.
4. Finally, I delete the old url and it is replaced forever by a 301 Redirect pointing to my new location, filesize problems eliminated.

301 Redirect Code Used

This is so easy to do with RedirectMatch, way faster and easier than using mod_rewrite to handle this, and much less overhead. Note that this is a general command that I will leave up for a few weeks and slowly tighten it up by looking at my Google Analytics and Apache Logs. For instance, this first redirectmatch rule is an older RedirectMatch I still have active to redirect all the old links pointing at /2006/htaccess/apache-htaccess.html to /htaccess/apache-htaccess.html from when I ditched the date-based permalinks back in 2007, and you can see it is a little tighter than the 2nd one which also redirects requests for apache-htaccess.html/feed/ or trackback or whatever.

RedirectMatch 301 ^/2006/.*apache-htaccess.html$ https://www.askapache.com/htaccess/apache-htaccess/
RedirectMatch 301 ^/.*apache-htaccess.html(.*)$ https://www.askapache.com/htaccess/$1

Advanced 301 Redirects for SEO

I wrote a couple of articles that go into detail about maximizing the SEO with linking and redirects, it remains one of my most helpful articles to anyone trying to rank higher the right way, the Google way.. SEO Secrets of AskApache Part 2