Removing Directory from URL with .htaccess

Question

I have a site setup with a template directory called “pages” so I can call to the pages with the following URL:

http://sitename.com/pages/page-name

However, for SEO reasons I would prefer to remove the “pages” part of the URL so that it reads as:

http://sitename.com/page-name

A search on Google has presented some possible solutions but there is some type of conflict. Perhaps with the my rules to remove “index.php”? Can anyone offer any pointers? Below is my current redirect conditions.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  Options +FollowSymlinks
# Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
  RewriteEngine On
# BEGIN ExpressionEngine Rewrite
  RewriteBase /
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteCond $1 !\.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?$1 [L]
# END ExpressionEngine Rewrite
</IfModule>  

Answer 1

Does the 'pages' group contain your homepage? If so, just turn Strict URLs off. Then you can access /pages/my-page at /my-page.

Turning off Strict URLs makes the URLs less... strict. You will have to more 404 handling yourself. You will have to put some conditionals in your pages to check for extra segments.

For example, the template blog/post might display a post with a URL of /blog/post/my-blog-post.
However, you could access the exact same page at /blog/post/my-blog-post/extra/segments/blah/blah. Google would see these as different pages. Duplicate content, bad for SEO.

To fix this, add to your template something like:

{if segment_3}{redirect="404"}{/if}