Use of Apache mod_rewrite module for SEO?

[jcolman]

I'm curious if anyone here running a large, complex, dynamic site has used the Apache server mod_rewrite module  to simplify their site's URLs by rewriting them in a standard format.

The chief use of this module for SEO purposes would be to aid in canonicalization and reduce duplicate content.  For example, you could easily convert all of you ALL CAPS or MixedCase URLs to lower case, change all "/index.html" URLs to just point to "/", change all word seperators to hyphens, and so on.

Any server-side ninjas out there with stories to tell?  

[voitenkos]

I use Drupal CMS alot for my sites. It provides a simple .htaccess with mod_rewrite ON and examples. Also, if using drupal you can create alot of rules from the admin part (such as url aliases and 301 redirects) rather than in the file itself. So, you dont necessarily have to be a ninja to tweak all these settings.

Also alot of caching is done through mod_rewrite as when you cache the page to HTML and rewrite the path in .htaccess to use html cache when someone requests given url => speeds up the site , because it will not even need to touch a database and go directly to html file with cached data.

[TellThemEverything]

If you're looking for truly apache mod_rewrite stories I cannot help, but I have implemented site-wide redirect schemes so that (for example) all URL's are put into Title Case, all folders are redirected to ensure trailing slash, and much more.

It made a big difference and is highly recommended. Our duplicate content (that google wasnt even reporting but that we saw with tools like the IIS SEO toolkit http://www.iis.net/download/seotoolkit) dropped to zero and shortly afterwards our traffic increased as a result of increased keyword ranking almost across the board.

Too many people ignore this.