Sanitizing urls using php for seo friendly

Question

I am in the process of turning my urls seo friendly.

My urls for my blog currently look like:

http://domain.com/news/view-article.php?id=23+category=qrops+title=moving-your-pension-abroad---what-are-the-benefits?

How can I ensure characters like @ ? >< don't appear in my url?

How can I avoid duplicate --- ?

Code to generate the url is as follows:

<a class="small magenta awesome" title="View full article" href="view-article.php?id='.$row['id'].'+category='.strtolower($row['category']).'+title='.strtolower(str_replace(" ","-",$row['title'])).'">View full article &raquo;</a>

Pretty sure I am doing something wrong but I'm trying...

Help appreciated..

I will move on to using the mod_rewrite in apache afterwards

possible duplicate of How to generate seo friendly url's with php? — JJJ
– JJJ, Commented Sep 24, 2011 at 13:41
Your URL is already SEO friendly (yes SEs deal with it nowadays). You probably mean human readable. — hakre
– hakre, Commented Sep 24, 2011 at 14:21

jwchang · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-24 13:23:08Z

I used to use this function

function SEO($input){ //SEO - friendly URL String Converter //ex) this is an example -> this-is-an-example $input = str_replace("&nbsp;", " ", $input); $input = str_replace(array("'", "-"), "", $input); //remove single quote and dash $input = mb_convert_case($input, MB_CASE_LOWER, "UTF-8"); //convert to lowercase $input = preg_replace("#[^a-zA-Z]+#", "-", $input); //replace everything non an with dashes $input = preg_replace("#(-){2,}#", "$1", $input); //replace multiple dashes with one $input = trim($input, "-"); //trim dashes from beginning and end of string if any return $input; }

For an example, you can use this by

echo "<title>".SEO($title)."</title>";

genesis · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-24 13:14:01Z

1

I use this sweet function to generate SEO friendly URL

function url($url) { $url = preg_replace('~[^\\pL0-9_]+~u', '-', $url); $url = trim($url, "-"); $url = iconv("utf-8", "us-ascii//TRANSLIT", $url); $url = strtolower($url); $url = preg_replace('~[^-a-z0-9_]+~', '', $url); return $url; }

answered Sep 24, 2011 at 13:14

genesis

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4 Comments

hakre Over a year ago

This function is removing information which would be good to have in the search engine instead of being removed.

hakre Over a year ago

UTF-8 characters not part of the us-ascii pane for example. Imagine you've got non-english text (e.g. japanese) in the title. This will so break it.

genesis Over a year ago

@hakre: Do you have any official resources (from Google for example) what is and what isn't good, please?

hakre Over a year ago

Google has lots of such documented in their help system, search for webmaster resources, e.g. google.com/support/webmasters/bin/…

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