301 redirect for duplicate content
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Hey,
I have just started working on a site which is a video based city guide, with promotional videos for restaurants, bars, activities,etc.
The first thing that I have noticed is that every video on the site has two possible urls:-
http://www.domain.com/venue.php?url=rosemarino
http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarinoI know that I can write a .htaccess line to redirect one to the other:-
redirect 301 /venue.php?url=rosemarino http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino
but this would involve creating a .htaccess line for every video on the site and new videos that get added may get missed.
Does anyone know a way of creating a rule to rewrite these urls?
Any help would be most gratefully received.
Thanks.
Ade.
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Hi.
Thanks for both of your replies, I really appreciate the help.
You were 100% right Aran, I just checked through the .htaccess file and there is already a rewrite rule which converts the nice SEO friendly one in to the not so nice and friendly one.
This seemed like madness to me but when I looked deeper it appears that the developer has included this rewrite rule so that the query string attached to the URL can be used for pulling stuff from a databse on various pages.
Not the best for SEO but the whole site seems to rely on this.
I have added some coding in to the site that uses the same query string to create a rel canonical tag.
Thanks again for the help, I wouldn't have got there without the guidance.
Ade.
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Agreed a Canonical tag will solve your Dupe content issue.
Though I think theres a deeper issue. I will hazard a guess that you already ahve a set of rewrite rules which allow the http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino URL to work?
A redirect may get you stuck in a loop if the venue.php is rewritten to /venue/rosemarino
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Hi,
I think the canonical tag may be useful in this situation.
If the URLs follow the same format you could create a regular expression for the 301, which in theory would prevent missing videos and would essentially be a much cleaner/elegant way of meeting your requirement.
Hope this helps.
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