301 redirect for duplicate content

[AdeLewis]

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/rosemarino

I 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.

[lavellester]

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.

[Aran_Smithson]

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

[AdeLewis]

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.