In a recent project we are restructuring a site to be more intuitively architected. But what impact will moving the directories or pages have on all that hard earned Search Engine Ranking Optimisation work?

This article deals with how to safely redirect users from an old page or folder to the new URL, and keep Search Engine's informed of your changes without leading them to dead content (Dead content is bad and will adversely affect your Site rankings).

[More]

One of the more common tasks in ColdFusion development is passing variables through the URL string. We are all familiar with the idea that the question mark (?) denotes the url query string start, and that name value pairs are separated with the ampersand (&).

I usually avoid using this in display templates, as it isn't great exposing your internal site workings to customers, and with Fusebox it is very easy to pass the URL variables to an "act_" template and remain hidden.

What happens when you want to use dynamic url variables with a URL re writing application like Isapi re write? I've been using Isapi re write in some FuseBox framework application, and it is relatively easy to set up a rewrite rule, as shown below.

Where the url /home/ would actually serve up the content specified in the fuse specified. But this is hard coded. What about dynamic variables?

We can create a regular expression to handle the translation of the variables.

We use a similar URL, but append the dollar ($) 1 = dollar ($) 2 string. In the re write rule we specify that appended variables are transposed into the string using the slash (/) as a separator.

So as an example we could pass a product id of 24 into the rule like this:

It would be rewritten to the more familiar url string. A handy way of continuing to mask the url.

One of the more recent additions to my Coldfusion frameworks is masking the more ugly URL's using Isapi rewrite. In this article I'll be using Helicon's Isapi ReWrite, but Apache re write works in much the same way.

Usually in your Coldfusion frameworks, most other technologies as well, you are passing around a variable or two to control the page content, and more often than not it is in the url. It never looks particularly clean if your URL has a long name value query string behind it, like this:

Cosmetic reasons

So for two reasons URL rewriting seems like a good idea.

Firstly to mask those ugly URLS with a url rewriter. On a basic level this will re write specified request to the URL you tell it to, taking your ugly list of name value pairs and changing it into a user friend URL. If you are pitching this to a client this looks a lot more professional.

Security reasons

Secondly there is an added security benefit here. The URL gives a lot away about a website, like what the code base is, and is potentially a window on the internal workings of a website. Take a normal FuseBox application for example. The normal URL might be:

From here it is very easy to start messing around with the controller names, trying to dig out an 'admin' controller, or other common function controller. Similarly adding values to pages where it is obvious a Query has been fired is an easy way of testing of the developer is using 'cfQueryParam', with potentially disastrous results.

Along the same lines it is quite simple to inject form values into the URL (like this http://www.mccran.co.uk/index.cfm/2009/7/30/Cross-site-Script-hacking-using-the-GET-method). By masking the URL and the values you make it considerably more difficult to do this, after all if you can see or get to the URL, how can you fool around with it?

So far I am implementing a rewrite script that will rewrite URLs into friendly strings, here is a modified version of the .htaccess file I'm using.

This code starts off by turning the rewriteEngine on, then setting the rewriteBase, this is typically your webroot, or the root of the site the file is for. Then it rewrites any URL params to the URL string.

The main part of the code is where we set individual rewriteRule's for each URL. The first example (home) looks for any URL requests to the 'home' string, and re writes this to the URL in the regular expression (index.cfm?go=controller.home). Pretty straight forward really.

There is a lot more you can do with this, and hopefully I'll get to explore rewriting in more depth in the future.