Question

I have a cms that does not generate friendly url’s

What is the best way to rename this without getting double content by google.

Now I have in .htacces:

    RewriteEngine On

    RewriteBase /

    RewriteRule welcome.html page.php?1[L]
    RewriteRule about-us.html page.php?2[L]

Is this the best way to do?

Any help would be appreciated

Answer 1

Google has no problem spidering and indexing this very simple dynamic URL scheme. But if you want extra onpage-optimization-bonus-points with the help of keyword-stuffed-URLs it would be best you switch to a CMS that creates them automatically. You save time by avoiding to maintain the link-scheme manually both in your content and the rule-file.

If not there’s always the chance you forget to replace those dynamic links with your readable ones if you create new content. Also your cms will always answer both variants: the friendly one and the dynamic one, so you have to tell Google the “canonical” URL (Explanation here) to avoid duplicate content. This might happen because you can’t tell how people link to content on your site.