Disclosed herein are method, systems and architectures for normalizing identifiers corresponding to resources using normalization rules that can be generalized for use with different resources. By way of a non-limiting example, an identifier can be a uniform resource locator (URL), and a normalization rule can be used to normalize URLs that correspond to different resources, e.g., content. A normalization rule can be generated by generalizing two or more normalization rules corresponding to different resources, such that a content determinative component is generalized. A normalization rule can be defined to include a context portion used to determine the rule's applicability to an identifier, and a transformation portion that identifies the transformations to be applied to an applicable identifier to yield a normalized form of the URL. A generalization of two or more normalization rules can include a normalization of one or both of the context and transformation portions.