Eliminating Duplicate `index.php?q=` URLs in Evolution CMS

One of the classic Evolution CMS SEO mistakes is letting the same page resolve in two ways: the normal friendly URL and the legacy index.php?q=... variant. Search engines then see duplicate pages, analytics get messy, and backlinks can split between two addresses.

The practical fix is simple: keep the friendly URL as the only public version and permanently redirect the index.php?q=... request to the canonical page. If your .htaccess rules still allow direct access to the query-string variant, the site may look fine to editors while quietly producing duplicate URLs.

The rule set usually needs two parts:

• make sure friendly URLs resolve normally through the main rewrite block;
• intercept requests that explicitly expose index.php?q= and redirect them to the clean path.

After that, verify the homepage, nested pages, and old campaign links. This is especially important on sites that have gone through several hosting moves or inherited older rewrite rules from pre-Evolution builds.

The real goal is not just “make the URL prettier”, but “make every document have one public address”. Once that is true, canonical tags, sitemaps, and internal links all become more reliable.