How to use a 301 Redirect when the first 301 Redirect is not the same as what's indexed?

[PatriotOutfitters81]

This post is deleted!

[mihaiaperghis]

Hey Jessica,

Due to the way your CMS works, the segment between the /p/ and the /19635 part is irrelevant to getting the right data from the database in order to display the correct product. In fact, you can write anything there and the URL will still work.

For example: http://www.patriotoutfitters.com/p/random-string/19635

It's probably quite difficult to hack your CMS in order for this not to happen, or change it to another CMS completely. The easy solution (might still require some small modifications or perhaps a plug-in) is using a rel="canonical" tag to always specify the right URL that you want for that specific page. This way the search engine won't read the separate URLs as duplicate content.

There's also the alternative of using the meta refresh tag (instead of the rel="canonical") to do a 301 redirect, since you will probably not be able to do it with .htaccess. I wouldn't use it though, especially since the users aren't affected by the different URLs, and you're only interested in informing the search engines.

Hope this helps!

[PatriotOutfitters81]

Thanks so much, Mihai! I'll investigate into the rel="canonical" tag solution.