How can I prevent the Magento rewrite engine from appending -1,-2 etc to URLs?
Magento’s rewrite engine is known for causing SEO issues, with the numbers being appended to URLs being the most common one. The URLs are created when Magento thinks that the URL is already in use or has been used in the past – uploading via CSV can cause this issue because you’re essentially over-writing the existing URLs.
There’s also an error in a recent Magento Enterprise release that causes a lot of these issues.