The URL Rewriting consists in rewriting on the fly the addresses "a little barbarian" of our favorite CMS.

For example, to transform:

• http://www.my-domain.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1&Itemid=2

in a much clearer address (for the user but also and especially for the search engines) of the type:

• http://www.my-domain.com/section/article/my-article.html
  
  

Rewriting of URL

In order to use the URL rewriting functions with your Joomla website (as on any site), it is necessary that the server module mod_rewrite is charged. To check, PHPInfo - > Apache - > Loaded Modules.

The majority of the hosting company already installed it because it is almost always out of standard with Apache. Then, to begin, do not forget to activate SEF (Search Engine Friendly) in the global configuration. Then you must rename the htaccess.txt file in .htaccess (via ftp for example). This file is located at the root of your Joomla!. Once mode SEF is activated, you must obtain URL of the type:

• http://www.my-domain.com/section/article/

The search engines like this kind of URL and you should see the number of indexed pages increasing appreciably (to be checked on 4 to 8 weeks). Now you have your website with URL known as “clean” thanks to the URL Rewriting URL Optimization :

There exists few free components allowing URL optimization for Joomla (or Mambo), we can quote: 404SEF, XAENON or OpenSEF.

In commercial version, there is SEF Advanced which is rather well succeeded. I would propose you in a forthcoming article, a comparative of existing solutions. Your positioning is much better with such component. You can indeed specify alias for certain URL, replace certain characters (such as the accents for example) or the support multi-languages.

The URL rewriting cannot work when your site is under development on an address of the  type http://91.112.223.85/~your_account (as for OVH for example), it is necessary to await that your website is effectively "live" to be able to activate it. To finish, in the file configuration.php of Joomla, you should not put slash “/” at the end of the absolute way ($mosConfig_absolute_path) and URL of the site ($mosConfig_live_site). In the contrary case, you are likely not to be able to make function the rewriting of URL.