Ken Shafer's Bloggity-Blog

GoDaddy .htaccess mod_rewrite is working!!!

Ok, so I know this is a little out of the blue but a recently acquired SEO client is using GoDaddy for their hosting. Their domain name is something to the effect of www.chicago(businesstype).com. I’ve only been optimizing the site for a couple of weeks and we’re already doing well for keyword phrases using “chicago.”

However, the client wants to attack markets in the surrounding suburbs so I needed to come up with a quick way to create “city pages” for each new market. I did this by using www.domain.com/cityPage.php?city=name. Easy enough…but i needed something friendlier for Google. Enter mod_rewrite for GoDaddy.

I searched around online until I found this combination which works for me.
Original URL: www.domain.com/cityPage.php?city=name (meh)
New URL: www.domain.com/name (wonderful!)

Here’s the magic code!
Options FollowSymLinks
Options -MultiViews
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)/?$ /cityPage.php?city=$1 [L]

You can see this code working at the Chicago Title Loans site (www.chicagotitleloans.com)

Enjoy!

thx to the following sites for your help!
http://gidden.net/tom/2006/05/26/4/
http://surf11.com/entry/153/godaddy-hosting-mod-rewrite-with-htacces
http://www.btjones.com/2007/12/09/godaddy-mod_rewrite-problem-fix/
http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3380566.htm