Clunky navigation on client site.

Worried about duplicate content

[Illah]

So I'm working on a client site and I can't simply redesign it, however I'm running into a clunky problem left from the original designer.

First, it's a flat HTML site, so that's never fun :-)

To create a semi-dynamic nav the original designer used javascript rollovers in the nav-text to create drop-down menus. When you rollover, the menus drop down and stay down unless you roll over another menu item.

When clicking on a link in a drop down, the target page then has an onLoad event that pulls down the drop-down menu automatically for the section you clicked on.

The problem is my client has the same page linked from different dropdowns, and to keep the menus consistent there are duplicate pages with different onload events to pull down the appropriate drop-down.

For example:

page.html (onload="menu1")
page2.html (onload="menu2")

Any elegant ways to remove the dupe pages without completely re-doing the nav? I thought about passing a variable in the URL but I'm worried Google will then see *that* as a dupe page.

For example:

page.html?from=menu1
page.html?from=menu2

...or is Google now smart enough to realize that's the same page?

Thanks!

--Illah

[edited by: Illah at 9:55 pm (utc) on Dec. 6, 2007]

[jtara]

They attempt to detect this, and guess at the "best" page to display. As well, you can clarify with a sitemap.

A couple of useful pages at the official Google Webmaster Central blog:

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]