How to have unique URLs for a single dynamic page? - url

Question

I think my question may be worded incorrectly but heres what I want to do (for SEO purposes).
I have a page that gives a logo and description of a brand e.g. Volvo. I want to use this same page as a template for all manufacturers but just change a few words around to customize it for each manufacturer accordingly. So in the URL I pass it a variable of the manufacturer e.g. "www.example.com/cars.cfm?manufacturer=BMW" and it will show a page that gives information about BMW.
The problem is that for each manufacturer the information is still showing up as the same page "cars.cfm" in the address bar but really I want it to go to a URL like "www.example.com/manufacturers/volvo.cfm" so it appears as a unique page just for that brand. But at the same time I don't want to have to create a seperate CFM (or php/asp) page for each manufacturer.
Is there a clever way to do this at all? I imagine its something to do with URL rewriting but not sure. I am using IIS 7.5.
Creating numerous sub-folders for different car manufacturers is going to be very tedious. My site would also include other types of manufacturers for different products not just cars. I guess URL rewriting would be best but my idea was to have a different 'page' for each manufacturer so the SEO would be improved.
Basically....
www.example.com/manufacturers/audi.cfm
www.example.com/manufacturers/bmw.cfm
www.example.com/manufactueres/volkswagen.cfm
But really I want the data on each of those pages to come from a database which contains unique data for each manufacturer such the logo image and history description.
Here is an example of what I mean:
http://www.fivestarautocentre.co.uk <-- go to bottom of that page and you can see links to various manufacturers

Answer 1

Building on what everyone else said, start by creating your www.example.com/cars.cfm?manufacturer=BMW page and get that working.
Assuming you're on IIS you would then create a web.config file (if it isn't already there) in your root folder.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name="Cars-Rewrite">
<match url="manufacturer/(\w+)" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="/cars.cfm?manufacturer={R:1}" />
</rule>
</rules>
</rewrite>
</system.webServer>
My regex could be off, but maybe someone else could chime in with the correct regex.

Answer 2

You can certainly handle this with URL rewriting as others have suggested but I think I would take a different approach. Particularly for SEO purposes. The best solution for SEO will be an actual URL for each brand. With that in mind create your site accordingly. Don't use a generic www.example.com/cars.cfm page, use www.example.com/bmw, www.example.com/volvo, etc. You can still have a ColdFusion page under each of those folders that does nothing more than include your generic ColdFusion template from another location (or call a cfc). Since each folder will have it's own unique stub file you can pass the appropriate vehicle manufacturer when the generic ColdFusion template is called. For example, under the www.example.com/bmw page:
<cfset manufacturer = "bmw" />
<cfinclude template="/mytemplates/genericpage.cfm" />
Then your genericpage.cfm uses the assigned variable to display the appropriate text and graphics. You could even get around having to set a particular variable under each folder by parsing the URL and grabbing the manufacturer from it when the template is included and executed. I believe the cgi.script_name variable will contain the path needed to do this.