While working on a community project, this is what I learned. In my site a custom flash player is used to play the videos. That player can be customized for each member. They can create their own player with the selected videos and publish it in their site.
So they want to know how many of the users are viewing the videos by using their player.
So in my code, I have used following URL:
http://example.com/widget/player.swf?vid=1&mid=1&lang=fr
But, we know some search engines track this type of dynamic pages as one page regardless of the query string values.
When a video plays in this player it keeps the reference URL as following:
http://example.com/widget/player.swf
This doesn’t allow us to track how many users have viewed the videos using their own player.
To fix this problem, we have used a smart way using a .htaccess rule.
Rule:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^widget/player.rockband.swf /widget/player.swf
Now the user can use this URL to embed his player
http://example.com/widget/player.rockband.swf?vid=1&mid=1&lang=fr
The benefit of using this is, now the referrer URL of the video ishttp://example.com/widget/player.rockband.swf
Now, the user can easily track, how many videos has been viewed by using his widget only.
If you want to use any name that needs to be redirected to player.swf, then we can use the following .htaccess rule.
Rule:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^widget/player\.([^/]+)\.swf /widget/player.swf