I’ve not tried this on an existing website before so I’m not certain. However, I would expect that Google would index your new URLs just fine – it just might take some time for it to stop indexing the old URLs (especially if the website has external inbound links pointing to the old URLs).

Just make sure you update your sitemap, as well as all the links within your site, with the new URLs. You may not be able to stop Google indexing the old URLS but you can certainly make sure it starts indexing the new ones.

Adam

What you would need to do for your example is firstly ensure that products in your database cannot have duplicate names. Then change the destination page so that it retrieves the product by its name instead of its ID number. So, you would have something like:

product.php?name=$name

Then you would direct users to a fake URL, something like:

product/product-name

Then you would use htaccess to retrieve the product name from the fake URL and parse it to the page as the $name variable, so the line in htaccess would be something like:

RewriteRule ^product/(.+)?$ product.php?name=$1

Hope that makes sense

http://www.mysite.com/product/some-product

And if the name “some-product” already existed it would change to

http://www.mysite.com/product/some-product-2

Something like that. Similar to wordpress.

These days, website content is often generated dynamically. On a lot of websites, a single page (or script) is used to generate multiple pages of content on the website. For example, on a blog, you might have a single page……