Am I right in thinking that the text “Corn_Muffin_Mix” is for search engines only? If this is true where can I find out more about this optimisation method. I cannot find any resources online that explain about MOD REWRITES where the link includes text that is in the URL is just for search engines!?!?! How do I do it?
You’re exactly right, the text in the URL is for search engine purposes only. Or actually more to make it easy to read to for people. Search don’t care a whole lot about nice URLs (they do a little though).
A good tutorial on mod_rewrite can be found here: Apache’s mod_rewrite
BTW. The fact that the URL still works if you remove (portions of) the word is pretty bad btw. If somehow two different versions of the URL get linked then search engine might penalize for duplicate content, since the same content can be found on two different URLs.
The idea is that the number 12 in the URL indicates which article actually needs to loaded and what I always do in my applications is make sure the text in URL is correct for the article requested, and if not 301 redirect to the appropriate URL to avoid duplicate content.
