.htaccess and seo-friendly urls

Question

We have an ecommerce site right now that carries a range of brands. The brand pages carry urls as follows:

1. http://www..com/catalog/brand/vi

Answer 1

Unless you think the brand names are likely to change then you want to do 2 rewrites, one as a redirect and one internal:

RewriteRule ^catalog/brand/view?id=2 / [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^ /catalog/brand/view?id=2

This means that browsers / spiders will always see the nice URLs while your application will see the real ones.