About three months ago, I was migrating a Magento 1.9 app to a new server and truncated the core_url_rewrite table due to an error while indexing.
Everything's been fine, though I recently found out that a large number of hrefs in my HTMLs, which previously followed the format example.com/something-seo-friendly.html, have been turned into something like the following, which is considerably less SEO-friendly.
example.com/catalog/product/view/id/<INT>
I started digging a bit and realized for a lot of those cases, there actually is an entry in core_url_rewrite, where
request_path=something-seo-friendly.htmltarget_path=catalog/product/view/id/<INT>.
However, not only do the HTML docs contain a lot of those not so SEO-friendly URLs, but also I am getting a 404 page when trying example.com/something-seo-friendly.html.
I was hoping to resolve the issue by adding some missing request paths using a backup from before migration, but dont know what to do next as the relevant entry exists.
P.s. the only difference between the old and the new entry is the primary key, i.e. url_rewrite_id. There is also a cron job reindexing every few times a day.
