Duplicate Content Issue

[Tonearm]

Hello! I'm concerned that Google may misinterpret my in-URL sorting specification as duplicate content and penalize me. My URLs are like this:

www.mydomain.com/widgets-1-1-1.html

The first number specifies the page number, the second number specifies the page type (category, sub-category, or search), and the third number specifies the sort type (best selling or lowest price).

I'm concerned about the third number. It will either be 1 or 2, and changing it won't result in any new content, but only a different sorting of the content. Will Google see this as duplicate content and penalize me?

- Grant

[Nova Reticulis]

I don't know whether everyone else'd agree.. but you might want to write a robots.txt file prohibiting SEs from indexing your particular widget-1-*-* pages

[sublime1]

Our site uses a similar strategy and it worked with no issues whatsoever for a year -- basically moving what would otherwise be CGI params to the URL itself.

Keep in mind that the content will not exactly be duplicate (in the sense of being identical) since the results are sorted differently. On the other hand, assuming that all of the results are on one page, the term frequencies will be the same, so if google using this approach for finding dupes, the pages would be considered dupes.

Then, the "generally accepted" understanding of how Google treats dupes is that the first one it finds wins and the others are subordinated. The theory is that there's no actual penalty -- one page makes it in the SERPs and the rest don't. This theory has been strongly questioned in this forum as recently as the last few days. Especially if these links are on the same domain, I should think there is not much to worry about. Adding the restriction to robots.txt, as suggested earlier can't hurt, I suppose.

Or at least that's how I understand it.

[Tonearm]

Thanks for the info guys. I think I'll just drop it and leave it all as-is. It sounds like it shouldn't be a problem.