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To redirect transparently from visible.html to invisible.html, just do
RewriteRule ^visible\.html$ /invisible.html [L]
Jim
that's 301
mydomain.com/visible.html as the domain in the search results, but return invisible.html when the user views it? I mean, google won't list in the search result URL mydomain.com/invisible.html?
Therefore, in the example above, Google and any other requesting user agent will only see visible.html.
As far as anyone but you is concerned invisible.html does not exist. However, whenever visible.html is requested, the contents served to the requestor actually come from the file /yourserverpath/invisible.html, and it is visible.html that actually doesn't exist as a file. visible.html is effectively an alias for invisible.html.
This is quite useful for providing short, search-engine-friendly URLs for nasty, long URLs created by scripts and such.
Jim
index.php calls index.html and index.html is rewritten to welcome.php?
Will google just list it as 'http://www.abc.com' or will it see it as 'http://www.abc.com/index.html' (if it spiders the last case, it will bypass index.php all-together!')
It all depends on how you define "calls" and "rewrites". You can set this up any way you like, as long as you are careful. If you aren't careful, then you'll get a few "screwy links" floating around out there on the 'net, but it's not the end of the world.
Jim
I've read some posts about google requesting URLs that are not linked from anywhere else.
# Rewrite requests for visible.html to invisible.html, [L] flag forces mod_rewrite exit
RewriteRule ^visible\.html$ /invisible.html [L]
# Respond to any direct http request for invisible.html with 403-Forbidden
RewriteRule ^invisible\.html$ - [F] RewriteRule ^invisible\.html$ - [G] RewriteRule ^invisible\.html$ /visible.html [R=301,L]
Publicly-accessible server log files, unintentionally-published links, and visits to your own sites' "secret" pages with the Google Toolbar Advanced Features enabled are the most likely explanations. If there is no link, then excepting a Google Toolbar PR check, Google can't find it. If they do find it because of one of the above accidents, just rename the file to nonvisible.hmtl, change the rewrite rules, and you're good to go again.
However, if you have visible_1.html through visible_99.html all pointed to invisible.html, then yes, that is duplicate content, and most if not all of them will get a penalty and/or disappear.
Jim
