exclude certain files from .htaccess redirect

pjrobertson · 31st May 2008, 04:19 PM

Well, I've just moved all my files from .html to .php but most search engines still point to the html files.

I've made a .htaccess file with this in:

Code:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RedirectMatch 301 (.*)\.html$ $1.php
ErrorDocument 404 http://example.co.uk/error_docs/404.html

Which works, except I have some pages (as you can see, 1 is the 404 page) that need to stay as html. Some others are the googlesitemap validation file.

I've looked at

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/error_docs$

but I can't seem to get it to work. What's the best way of excluding files

the files I have are:

/error_docs/404.html
google466e821b876059fa.html

and a few folders such as
/design/
/scripts/

and a few others.

So as not to make a new topic: a few other things.

the 404 redirect:

sites like amazon.co.uk DON'T redirect the user to a new page if they get a 404

e.g. if you go to http://amazon.co.uk/adkfhkh
the error show up on that page as opposed to being sent to amazon.co.uk/custom404page.html

is there a way of doing this?

The final thing:

I recently updated the diary / blog on the site to wordpress (from 100% manual!)
so I have pages like
nov07.html
dec07.html
etc. that I want to redirect to /diary/

is there a way of doing this?

I've tried

Code:

RedirectMatch 301 (.*)07\.html$ /diary

thanks

Samizdata · 31st May 2008, 10:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pjrobertson

I've just moved all my files from .html to .php but most search engines still point to the html files.

I'm afraid this is an "I wouldn't start from here" question - better to have done this:

Code:

# Parse html as php
AddType application/x-httpd-php .html
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .html
AddType text/html .php 
AddHandler php-script .php .html

All your .html pages would have turned into .php by magic (or something similar).

Quote:

Originally Posted by pjrobertson

sites like amazon.co.uk DON'T redirect the user to a new page if they get a 404

That's because they have the correct code (relative path):

Code:

# Custom error
ErrorDocument 404 /error_docs/404.html

Any links in the 404.html (including CSS and images) should be absolute.

Quote:

Originally Posted by pjrobertson

I want to redirect to /diary/

Something like this should probably work:

Code:

# Set options
Options +FollowSymlinks
# Turn on mod_rewrite
RewriteEngine On
# If file has required ending
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} 07\.html$
# and is not in diary
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/diary/
# Redirect to file of same name in diary
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/diary/$1 [R=301,L]

...

pjrobertson · 1st June 2008, 09:36 AM

Thanks Samizdata.

A simple solution to the 404 error document problem, and my wordpress / diary redirect no works great

Unfortunately I've changed all the pages to php now,
would the best solution be to just select the ~20 pages that are now .php in the .htaccess and redirect them as opposed to using wildcards, or would this make the loading of pages slower (because of parsing etc.)?

Thanks again

Samizdata · 1st June 2008, 07:48 PM

I'm not sure I entirely understand your situation, but here are a few thoughts.

Cool URLs don't change - I would expect a drop in rankings (possibly for months) if you get this stuff wrong.

If, as you say, the search engines are still pointing to your .html files it may not be too late to change the extensions back and use the code I posted to have them parsed as php - but I would be paying very close attention to what GoogleBot has been doing in your site logs.

If there are only twenty files then renaming them will be a quick job, and though you will obviously have to change your internal links as well the whole process can be done very quickly with the find and replace feature of Dreamweaver or any good text editor.

External inbound links are beyond your control so if you are determined to change to the new .php extension then you need to use 301 redirects in .htaccess for all of them, though it is usually possible to do this without writing a line for each individual file.

I would not expect any difference in page loading times whichever way you go.

I wish you luck.

...

pjrobertson · 2nd June 2008, 08:06 AM

I think I'll take your advice then...

googlebot has indexed my new sitemap (with .php links) and has indexed some of my .php pages, but from what you say I may lose some rankings.

Thanks for your help!