[SOLVED] Need to assign a custom url to a page menu item - Can't use "page links to"
 

Here's an interesting twist - I have a travel information\hotel reservation site (http://www.hotels-onsale.com) that I'm trying to build out but it's a massively tough SEO space so I need every SEO advantage I can get - which basically means that I need to minimize my stupid mistakes and do lots of research.

Being careful to not implement bad SEO config that will shoot me in the foot and then content, content and more content is my plan to address that (and hopefully one day I can work on optimizing the SEO a little better) but I had to first get past a huge hurdle. From everything I've read, Google penalizes duplicate content (many others on similar priceline partner network sites as I am with the same white labeled back end). Those links are blocked at the subdomain level but since affiliate links may also cause SEO to suffer, I want to hide them and also be sure to block the search engines from those back end\subdomain pages myself to be sure.

Yoast (Recognized SEO guru) has a solution whereby you implement the "Simple url" plugin which creates a custom post type that ads "/go/" to all of your url's that link to the back end of your site where the affiliate pages are (In my case the Priceline.com hotel booking engine) and then you add "Disallow: /go/" to your robots.txt so the pages are indexed but not followed.

In setting this up, I realized that the plain links on my site were easy to configure but I have 2 page menus items that link directly to the back end:

Rental Car Discounts
http://book.hotels-onsale.com/car/home/?refid=2787

FAQ
http://book.hotels-onsale.com/help/faq/?refid=2787

If I use the "page links to" plugin (which I'm actually already using to redirect these pages) to redirect:

http://book.hotels-onsale.com/rental-cars/ TO:
http://book.hotels-onsale.com/go/rental-cars/ (With this then being redirected to the affiliate link by "Simple url's") - I worry that that may be picked up by Google as being a little fishy so I was really hoping to assign url's to those two page menu items of:

http://book.hotels-onsale.com/go/rental-cars/

http://book.hotels-onsale.com/go/faq/

and then have "simple url's" handle it directly from there. (These are all 301 redirects, by the way)

JD, Larry..Does this seem reasonable? Can you guys or someone help me with the code to assign those url's to the page menu items? I think I have it somewhere but I thought this would be an interesting case for the forum!

Thanks!
Thomas

Issue is resolved