To make this work, change line 178 in “app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Url/Rewrite.php” from

$requestPath = trim($request->getPathInfo(), ‘/’);

to:

$requestPath = ltrim($request->getPathInfo(), ‘/’);

Works fine for me!

This should work for any dynamic content cms/ecommerce platform (depending on their internal URL structure and customisability), try it out in .htaccess:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on

#rewrite everything to index.php apart from blog pages

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/blog/
RewriteRule . /shop/index.php [L]

DirectoryIndex shop/index.php

This basically rewrites all URLs that aren’t physical files or directories to ‘shop/index.php’, with the exception of any URIs starting with ‘/blog/’.

The last statement tells the root to serve ‘shop/index.php’ (this can cause duplicate content between root and ‘shop/index.php’ so add a RewriteRule to prevent it).

Why Would I Want to Do This?

My only reason for doing so was to move seperate installations into subfolders (while serving /shop/index.php at the root) – just helps keep everything tidy and segmented in the server root directory.

It seems to me Facebook have made this a little difficult to change, as the options aren’t within the settings of your profile account (or at least I had difficulty finding them anyway).

I’d like to demonstrate how to change these URLs and make your profile public (so you stand a greater chance of ranking your profile for your name)- personal reputation management if you will.

Changing Facebook Vanity URLs

You would’ve thought Facebook would add the settings to changing this from within the privacy options in your profile, right? Not the case. This blog post points you to this page to change facebook URLs. Unfortunately you can’t use hyphens or underscores as seperators, so if someone already has your name (like the b*****d who beat me to it!) I recommend subtle changes (drop your initial or something in there), as long as your name is in the URL (or whichever name you are providing remedial reputation management for).

Great!

The next step if you haven’t already done so is to make your profile visible to search engines.

Making Facebook Profile Visible to Google & Other Search Engines

Again, you would’ve thought Facebook would make this easy, right? Took me ages [read 'a search on Google'] to find this out. Whilst still logged into your account, head over to the Facebook Search Privacy page and change ‘Search Visibility’ to ‘Everyone’.

Make Facebook Profile Public

To keep things a little more private I’ve only selected ‘My Profile Picture’, ‘A link to add me as a friend‘ and ‘A link to send me a message’. I haven’t tested this, but if you had a fan page …say a client fan page you’re trying to rank above negative results?, in theory this would be an easy link through to their fan page which would now become visible to Google with a little crawling? (let me know your views on this below).

I’ve also checked ‘Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing (see preview)’ and click ‘Save Changes’, and voila, you now have a public facebook page with a keyword rich URL on a strong domain with an optimised title tag. I suggest interlinking this page with other profile pages on your other networks (Twitter, Flickr etc… you know the rest!), maybe point a few extra anchor text links at the page (like this shameless example for Adam Miller) and with little effort you should have your Facebook profile ranking easily.

Got questions? Let me know below.