So, you are running a WordPress Blog on a windows hosting account…
And you have read all about these great options to improve your search engine rankings by using the right Permalink structuur.
You want to use that to, but somehow it you just can’t get it to work, the .htaccess file doesn’t work, and you get all kinds of strange errors.
Well, that is just because you are running it on Windows, like on your own PC ore server.
To work with .htaccess and Apache and Mod_Rewrite, you need to be on a Unix / Linux based machine.
But here is a solution that comes close the the options I pointed out in the previous post.
On a Windows based machine you should not use /%postname%/ but instead you use /index.php/%postname%/Â
This will give you a URL like www.example.com/index.php/wordpress-permalinks-on-windows-hosting/
So yes, there is a index.php in the URL, but is gives you the better part of rewriting that the big boys do 
And the best part…. your old URL should still work and pick-up the new URL.
Try it, check a nice post for your website from the Google results page and see if you are forwarded to the new URL on your windows based WordPress installation…
4 responses so far ↓
drmike // February 27, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Actually you can do it on a Windows machine. You just have to pay for one of the many addons that are on the market that allow you to do mod_rewrites.
Hummerbie // February 27, 2008 at 7:17 pm
@drmike: Yes, I know, but most of the people don’t run there own servers, and they can’t install a module like the ISAPI rewrite engine.
Even a request for it to their Hosting provider will not help…
With the way I mentioned before you can still use SEF Urls for your WordPress blog
Thank you for your comment, it is a valued addition to the post.
Soeone // May 11, 2008 at 8:38 pm
cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1
cgi.force_redirect = 0
in a php.ini file worked for me!
Tanika // November 27, 2008 at 10:01 pm
This is good news, I’m really looking forward to playing around with it once the beta opens up.,