Advanced routing descriptive URLs to certain pages/posts

Question

This is a general SEO question.

In Wordpress you can create a page and define the permalink URL.

In Craft I want to do something similar. I want to build the backend with a common sense structure, but then define friendly URLs after. Eg: a page could exist somewhere like:

domain.com/holidays/french-river-cruises

Is it possible to define custom routing, so I could make the same page/post accessible on a more descriptive URL (for SEO reasons) to load the same page.

domain.com/summer-cruises-in-france

I know you can play with routes, but in this case I don't see how it would work that was as the slug doesn't match the post. But could this be hardcoded somehow in the advanced routes file?

Answer 1

So from an SEO perspective, the first URL is actually better, in that it provides even more context for the search engines to digest, index, and understand.

It's also bad from an SEO perspective to have two pages that have the same content. As long as you include a canonical URL it won't really hurt you, but the only real benefit I see from using your second URL schema is that it's easier to type. Which isn't really much of a concern these days imo.