Geek: Improve SEO on WordPress blog with HTACCESS

Even though this blog now mainly consists of drifting, motorsport, cars and other cool things, I still aim to keep my geek readers updated too! I’ve managed to source 2 different chunks of code to help any WordPress user along the way with (hopefully) improved SEO results to your blog. This post is talking entirely about that odd little file known as .htaccess, so pay attention, some real SEO advantages can come from this…

Firstly, I’ve now moved my blog from a .co.uk to a .com TLD, so I needed a htaccess mod to permanently move all requests from the old domain to the new domain. A two-liner from SEOblogr.com did it for me, and this is below

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?old-domain.co.uk
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.new-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

And the other part to my htaccess is the ability to remove query strings from the URL’s, and then again permanently redirect them to the blog post. A query string, by the way, is anything after the main request URI which isn’t already rewritten. ?query for example, and this code is here, taken from BrianCray.com

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !=""
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^p=.*
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wp-admin.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1? [R=301,L]

And that’s basically it! Just put both these bits of code after the line

RewriteBase /

In your .htaccess file, and you’re good to go. I’m seeing good results already from this. /endgeek

Sub-page links on Google Search Results

Just did a quick search on Google for “Dazecoop” and found that Google’s now included some of my most popular links from my homepage within their search results! I think this is called something like Google Sub-Page search results, but pretty neat either way.

Good times!

Using htaccess to ensure correct site domain name & redirect

If you’re lucky enough to have more than one extension of the same name domain name (.com and .co.uk for example), or even if you don’t, but have multiple domain names pointing to the same site, then you will almost certainly benefit to redirect all traffic to just one domain name.

Continuing with the SEO side of things, Google & other search engines out there aren’t too keen on duplicate content, as I’m sure you’re aware of. If you’re running with more than one domain name and they’re both pointing to the same patch on the Internet, then there’s a good chance Google will see this as Dup Content.

Even if you’re only running with one domain, you may notice you can type in http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com and still get to the same thing (in most cases). Even this might be seen as another site, and therefore possible Dup Content. There’s an easy fix, however…

After some searching about to get a chunk of code which worked out of the box, this bit of htaccess code does the trick perfectly. Simply create a file named .htaccess in the root of your web directory, and paste in the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

In simple terms, the above script is basically saying, if the domain name is not www.domain.com, then redirect the page requested to http://www.domain.com with a 301-header permanent redirect on it.

So, for example, if you were to visit http://domain.com/page.html, then you’d be redirected to http://www.domain.com/page.html. Perfect!