apache - .htaccess and seo-friendly urls

Question

We have an ecommerce site right now that carries a range of brands. The brand pages carry urls as follows:

1. http://www.<DOMAIN>.com/catalog/brand/view?id=2

We need to utilize more friendly (seo-friendly) urls such as:

2. http://www.<DOMAIN>.com/<BRAND>

but such that it would resolve #1 above.

Is this done in .htaccess files in the root? If so, what is the correct way to go about this?

Keep in mind URL#1 is the legitimate address, but we want to utilize the URL#2 format for linking. It's not a 301 type redirect is it? That's more "permanent" unless I misunderstood it or something, no?

Many thanks.

Answer 1

The apache feature you are looking for is called mod_rewrite. You should be able to google and find good resources for help here.

The basic idea is you'll specify a regular expression matching and then a replacement pattern. You can set it to do a 301 redirect, but the default is to not redirect the user, just access the re-written url.

Here's an example:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.*) index.php

The RewriteRule says to rewrite any matching url(.*) to index.php. This is not particularly useful for most files. I'm sure you'll have plenty of examples as this is a common problem.