Does purposely linking to an invalid URL and then using 301 affect SEO?
- by Mike
On a section of my site, I am currently using .htaccess rewrites to put the ID as part of the URL instead of in the query, like so:
RewriteRule ^([a-z_]+)?/?tours/([0-9]+)/(.*) /tours/tour_text.php?lang=$1&id=$2&urlstr=$3 [L]
For example, if someone goes to /en/tours/12/some-text-here it will rewrite it to /tours/tour_text.php?lang=en&id=12&urlstr=some-text-here. However I don't want the users to be able to put just any text, so if they type in the wrong some-text-here part it will 301 redirect them to the right page.
This works perfectly, but I can see a potential problem potential arising when localizing the website, so I just wanted to make sure it's not actually a problem.
How it is now, if someone goes to /en/tours/12/some-text-here, the anchor to the Spanish version of that page will be /es/tours/12/some-text-here (i.e. only changing the "en" to "es"), and then the script will then 301 them to the correct Spanish text (something like /es/tours/12/algun-texto-aqui). And the reverse will also be the same. The anchor on the Spanish version to the English version would be /en/tours/12/algun-texto-aqui and then they will be forwarded with 301 back to /en/tours/12/some-text-here. Basically, the anchor changes the language and the 301 changes the string at the end.
So I have two questions:
Does purposely and permanently having invalid URLs on your site that get 301'ed to the correct ones have any effect on SEO? I could make it just show the correct URL to begin with, but this is a significant amount of work due to how I am handling the translations, so I would prefer just to 301 them.
Will the invalid URLs that are contained in the links be added to the search engine indexes even if they get 301'ed to another page?
