SEO friendly .htaccess always lead me to home page

Question

I have problem with seo friendly url. I've try to change my url with .htaccess and off course I have problem.

My link in header for my contact page is like this:

index.php?=contact

So I wrote rules in .htaccess like this:

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^contact index.php?=contact

And off course changed my link in header to be like this:

contact

And now when I click on contact on header I get nice url like this:

www.mywebsite.com/contact

But website lead me always to home page (index.php).

What I did wrong?

Panama Jack Panama Jack · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-27T22:44:23

Here give this a try and see how it works. You have an = between index.php?contact Try removing that.

If you want to make all your links URL friendly and not just contact you can do this.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^/]+) index.php?$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]

EDIT:

Your array is blank because you're not passing anything to it. I can't see how you check in your index.php file but you typically pass parameters as item=value like index.php?page=contact. You're not giving it an item using index.php=contact so your array is blank with the mod_rewrite.

Based on the info I have, if you used the variable as the item and value like below

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)$ index.php?$1=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]

Go to http://www.yoursite.com/contact

You'll get this from PHP $_GET

Array ( [contact] => contact )

But if you do this

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)$ index.php?page=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]

Then go to http://www.yoursite.com/contact

Then you'll get this from PHP $_GET

Array ( [page] => contact )

Then you check it like

if($_GET["page"] == "contact"){
//do whatever 
}else{
 //show homepage
}

There is nothing wrong with the .htaccess rules I can see. It's your PHP setup.

SEO friendly .htaccess always lead me to home page

2 Answers