URL Rewrites & Redirects: The Gory Details (Part 1 of 2)

URL Rewrites & Redirects: The Gory Details (Part 1 of 2): "The three types of URL rewrites

Rewriting of search engine sub-optimal URLs can be accomplished through three approaches. The first of which – using a “URL rewriting” server module/plugin such as mod_rewrite for Apache or ISAPI_Rewrite for Microsoft IIS Server – is the most popular. If you can’t use a URL rewriting module on your server, you might recode your scripts to extract variables out of the “path_info” part of the URL instead of the “query_string”. An example of this might look like http://www.example.com/index.php/category/widgets.

With either approach, you’d want to replace all occurrences of your old URLs in links on your site with your new search-friendly URLs. Additionally, you may wish to 301 redirect the old URLs to the new ones, but this is apparently optional with the advent of the canonical tag. The third approach would be to use a proxy server based solution (e.g. GravityStream) that eliminates the need to recode your site or re-architect your CMS/e-commerce platform. This can be useful when IT department involvement with SEO projects must be minimized, for whatever reason."