Maintaining Flexibility With URL Rewriting
November 13th, 2008 | 10:09 pmYou may have arrived here by following a link to http://davestevens.co.uk (or by entering that URL in your browser’s address bar, of course). If you have a keen eye, you’ll see that you’re now at http://davestevens.co.uk/blog or a descendant of this sub-directory.
This is achieved via mod_rewrite, an Apache module that lets you specify where the user should be directed when they enter a URL on your site.
When I am browsing around on other blogs and feel compelled to comment, I am often asked to enter my URL. Rather than entering the full link to the blog, I always enter the root URL - http://davestevens.co.uk - so that in future, should I move away from a blog format or perhaps rethink the type of content I am providing here, I won’t have to accommodate set incoming links to a defunct address.
How do you approach this consideration? Can anyone see any potential SEO issues through using this technique?
Looking at your redirect with Firebug, I can see that the initial request to http://davestevens.co.uk/ is being redirected to /blog via a 302 (Temporarily relocated). I reccomend that you change this to be a 301 (Permanantly redirected) to help with the ol’ SEO
Cheers Jonny, that’s a good spot. I’ve updated it so here’s hoping for some improved SEO performance!
Y’know, ’cause what I write here is so pertinent to the world at large.