One of my key things for giving a site the best SEO I can is to reduce the number of URLs that point to the same content. Plus it also makes my mint stats much clearer.

I’ve made a note of the little .htaccess niceties I’ve used in the setting up of this site.

No-www

My personal preference is to remove www from URLs, which is a simple rule seen all over the internet!

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)[\/]?$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

If you prefer, have the ‘www’ I’m no fascist, it’s more of a tidiness thing. But pick one.

Removing the trailing slash

When using a CMS such as textpattern, that uses URL rewriting, you can often get the same url with a trailing slash, I’ve found a way to remove that. Note the two lines that single out the mint (analytics) and rpc (connection for desktop blogging software) directories, if these aren’t in there the respective service will not function. This works for any directory, just copy the line and replace the name.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !rpc/(.*)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !mint/(.*)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (.*)[\/]$
RewriteRule ^(.*)[\/]$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

This also means Mint and Google Analytics does not record two separate URLs, one with a trailing slash and one without.

Redirect

On the previous site I had a page dedicated to the latest writing but on this new site I have only an anchor on the homepage to the latest blog posts. To redirect those people coming from the old deepcalm writing section I used this.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /writing[\/]?$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/#writing [NE,L,R]

Standard redirects

When importing the old articles I realised there was a couple of out of date pieces so I simply removed the articles and added standard redirects to the latest information.

Redirect 301 /writing/setting-up-a-ruby-on-rails-development-mac http://andycroll.com/writing/the-big-reinstall-setting-up-rails-on-leopard
Redirect 301 /writing/setup-a-ruby-on-rails-development-mac-on-os-x-leopard http://andycroll.com/writing/the-big-reinstall-setting-up-rails-on-leopard