html - How do I prevent google web crawler from reading a single page as two different pages

Question

I have a web page say example.com/blog/news.php which I used this code:

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [NC,L]

in the .htaccess file to hide the file extension. But google crawler reads example.com/blog/news.php and example.com/blog/news as two different pages. Please how do I prevent this, I tried to redirect the news.php page to news but it returned an error message saying to much redirect or something like that.

Answer 1

You can 301 redirect your .php URLs to the new (non-php ) format using the following rule and this way Google will only index your new URL.

Put the following right bellow RewriteEngine on and before your existing rules :

RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} ^$
RewriteRule ^([^.]+).php$ /$1 [L,R=301]