How to make better RESTful links SEO on static content website with Apache and PHP Router

Question

I have a pretty old website (running on Apache) that serves around 50 static HTML pages. And so I want to change it and add PHP Router to help me serve content in a RESTful way.

Now I have tried several things, but I don't know how good they are.

Say I have old page example.com/fooBar.html I want to be able to serve it from example.com/foo/bar and:

• keep old website link versions accessible from outside: example.com/fooBar.html
• make all requests go through index.php where I can use PHP Router, serve proper content for requests, keep old meta tags content intact (RESTful URIs should have same exact data)
• NOT have ugly links like this: example.com/index.php?page=foo/bar
• keep old version of a website's Google rating somewhat same
• keep 301 Redirects to a minimum (2 is max I guess?)
• change all website's inner links to new RESTful versions

So far I see that I can reference old pages to index like so:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !index.php
RewriteRule .* index.php?url=$0 [QSA,L]

This sends old pages to index.php and I can route Old Resources to New Ones like so: Changing location with router: $response->header("Location", "/foo/bar");

So the goal is for the location to look like example.com/foo/bar:

"example.com/fooBar.html" => index.php Router => "example.com/foo/bar"
"example.com/foo/bar"     => index.php Router => "example.com/foo/bar"

Is there a better way?

Answer 1

You have the right idea. The only thing that I would suggest would be to change your rewrite condition somewhat. I would use:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f  # not a real file
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d  # not a directory
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l  # not a symbolic link

This would prevent the rewrite rule from triggering on index.php (just like your rule does.) It would also allow you to serve other files (such as a robots.txt file, image files, or a pdf file) in the normal static manner.