Test whether Mod_Rewrite is enabled on your server

Posted by admin on December 1, 2008 under Guide |

Do you want to get more traffic for your store? If yes, make sure your magento shopping store is search engine friendly! To do this, make sure your web hosting provider’s server had Mod_Rewrite enabled. For my case, my web hosting provider’s server had Mod_Rewrite enabled which mean my store is ready to be index by major searcn engines companies anytime soon.

In this post, we will do a simple Mod_Rewrite test to check whether it is enabled on your web hosting provider’s server.

What is the advantage of having a search engine friendly store?

Major search engine companies like Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others can index all your products pages more easily. When a visitor search on these search engine, your magento store had a higher chance of showing up during the search result. Imagine 1/4 of the search engine users found your store? You will be rich!

Of course, if you want to get better search engine result like being in the top 10/20, you may have to consult a search engine optimization company to help you with that.

How does a search engine friendly URL look like?

An example of a search engine friendly url for a magento store look like this:

http://www.myabcstore.com/sony-vaio-vgn-txn27n-b-11-1-notebook-pc.html

An example of a Non-search engine friendly URL look like this:

http://www.myabcstore.com/products.php?r=233&view=hHeL&goto=3423

Here is a quick guide on how to check whether your server had Mod_Rewrite enabled.

Put this 3 lines in .htaccess on your site.

For cpanel user, it should be under /home/username/public_html/.htaccess

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yahoo.com/$1 [R=301,L]

When you visit your site and it get redirect to www.yahoo.com, that mean Mod_Rewrite is enabled on the server. If your webhost do not mod_rewrite enabled, you may want to consider switch to another Mod_rewrite & magento-ready web hosting provider .