301 redirect to avoid duplicate content issue

[tomaszjot]

I've already checked a lot of resources all over the Internet but could not solve this issue.

I have a very old site, custom built, which had this silly structure like:

examplesite.com/example.php?id=1777

With my unfulfilled coder ambition I decided to clean up URLs to:

examplesite.com/example/1777

To achieve this I used:

RewriteRule ^example/(.*)/?$ example.php?id=$1 [L]

and it pretty much is a zenith of my abilities.

So I left it for a while, traffic dropped to minimum and I reminded myself that this rewrite generated a lot of duplicate content.

So my question is - how do I make sure only /item/177 version is accessible/indexed? I guess 301 will do but how?

It's not an important issue but something which makes my brain itchy since it's a unsolved problem...

Thank you for attention and any help.

 

[Kiopa_Matt]

Not sure if I understand the question, but in your mod_rewrite rule just change the "[L]" at the end to "[R=301,L]".

Right now it'd be redirecting with a 302 code (moved temporarily).

 

[iamjon]

Setting the canonical URL of the page (to the URL that you would prefer to use) will solve any issues with duplicate URLs caused by query string data

e.g.

http://examplesite.com/example/1777?DUPLICATE

As far as I know, the current `RewriteRule` you are using isn't a redirect but a regular rewrite so you won't need to worry about `301` or `302` status unless you want the old format URL to be redirected to.

It would be useful to redirect all the old format URLs to the new format though via a `301` redirect so you might want to add a suitable `RewriteRule` for that. This is especially true if your site is still using URLs in the old format, which should ideally be updated to minimise redirects.

 

[Ron Weasley]

Use rel canonical. That would resolve your issue.