Forum Moderators: open
<background to question>
over the last few months I have transformed on of our old ( massive ) static sites into a dynamic catalogue system.
The catalogue is separated into many parent and child categories ( 3 tier,ish ) and certain products feature in multiple
categories.
A page can feature in our site many times where the only differences will be:
1) the presence of the menu variable passed with the url, and if it is present the value of the 'menu' variable.
2) the layout of the navigation menu, showing the customer where they arrived at the site
-examples-
[domain.co.uk...]
[domain.co.uk...]
[domain.co.uk...]
The menu variable is used to show the customer the path they arrived at this product via. ( it allows me to use the left-hand menu to show them where they are )
<question>
I have heard that google can penalise sites for having many pages of similar content. This is in reality the same page but due to the differing url's, it may not appear that way to the googlebot.
So, as ever folks, my real question is:
Am I at risk here?
Or can the googlebot differentiate between the main body of the url and any other peripheral variables passed after the '?'
Cheers all,
Marcus
P.S. I would post urls as an example but I believe it to be against webmasterworld posting policy. If anyone wants to look to get a clearer picture, please personal msg me )
[edited by: ciml at 11:40 am (utc) on Sep. 4, 2002]
[edit reason] domain snipped [/edit]
One way is to use the robots META tag for all pages with "?"s, another is to put those under www.domain.co.uk/subdirectory/product/995.htm?menu=52, block /subdirectory/ with /robots.txt and just allow www.domain.co.uk/product/995.htm to be spidered.
The downside of these approaches is that if people link to the excluded addresses they won't count for PageRank.
that is not a viable solution for us, I may have to remove the functionality that this is in place for or masquerade it in the url and rewrite that.
Anyone else have an opinion on this, I would realy like to show someone the urls if possible.
!idea!
I have thought of using the information passed in the ?menu=xxx variable to further modify the page as a solution to the apparent simularities. Would this aproach work?
