Those .htaccess rules should work fine with friendly URLs. Matt Cutts from Google in his blog says Google will follow several levels of 301 redirects just fine, but recommended to keep it around 2-3. So you'll be okay.
Can't share the .htacces rules for the bots. Not yet at least. It's part of an overall package I'm developing which includes a dynamically generated robots.txt file (different versions of the file for different crawlers with rules you set for each). I can post a screen shot of what's under way though. It also has mechanisms for "trapping" and reporting to you any bad bot which slips past the .htaccess rules and falls into a directory which humans never see on their browser screen. It then modifies .htaccess on the fly to block out newly trapped bots. Optionally the trap can have a CAPTCHA to allow humans through with strange browsers who may have been blocked, though I have this turned off on my site because in a year's time only 1 human was mistakenly taken to the CAPTCHA.
08-16-2013, 03:47 PM
It also has mechanisms for "trapping" and reporting to you any bad bot which slips past the .htaccess rules and falls into a directory which humans never see on their browser screen. It then modifies .htaccess on the fly to block out newly trapped bots. Optionally the trap can have a CAPTCHA to allow humans through with strange browsers who may have been blocked, though I have this turned off on my site because in a year's time only 1 human was mistakenly taken to the CAPTCHA.
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