SEO Step By Step Guide– 159. Understanding Mod Rewrite from the SEO Perspective

One of the ground rules of SEO is to come up with search engine friendly URLs. Search engine friendly URLs become highly relevant when we make use of a CMS that automatically generates the URLs for the websites that we generate using the CMS tool. The same applies to ecommerce websites. These auto-generated tools have a huge string with lot of special characters, which will throw the search engine bots off balance. One of the ways of dealing with this problem is to make use of Mod Rewrite module.

The Mod Rewrite tool is a software tool that modifies the URLs of the pages that are requested. The original URL remains unaltered but the users do not see the original URLs. When the page is displayed, the human visitor gets to see only the friendly URL that is easy to remember. The same applies to the search engine bots too. When the search engine spiders visit the search engines, they will see only those rewritten URLs that can be easily crawled by the search engines. This can be achieved by automating the rewriting process. However, we need to provide rules for rewriting the URL to the tool. The by itself cannot decide how to go about the conversion.

The mod rewrite tool comes in handy especially when you have a large website. Though it may not be technically sound to say this, virtually what is happening with mod rewrite is a permanent redirect is implemented. Whenever the URL is requested another URL is served but with the same content. This can sound too simplistic explanation of the mod rewrite module. Imagine having to redirect a large number of URLs if you happen to have a website with 100’s of pages. As the mod rewrite tool automates the entire process, the rewriting of the URL takes place on the fly. On the other hand, in case of permanent redirects, there should be an alternate file that can be fetched by the server request.

Every ecommerce website and every CMS managed website which does not have search engine friendly feature enabled, should implement mod rewrite to ensure that their URLs are easy to remember. If you are having many of your pages missed out in the indexing then your URL structure could be a possible problem. You will be able to increase the chances of getting all the pages indexed through mod rewrite. Another non-SEO benefit is to mod rewrite is that the end users will not be able to track the back end operations when an action is performed. So mod rewrite provides a good camouflage. In case mod rewrite is too complicated for your to handle, you can get professional help to implement this module for your website.

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