IIS Rewrite and Search engines

rewrite to avoid any penalties

[johnhh]

Any advice on what is the best way to avoid search engine duplicate content penalties after implementing IIS rewrite.

For example [domain.com...] is the old page that has been indexed by search engines.
Rewrite will give [domain.com...] However in some cases we have added an extra variable.

Would it best to do a 301, or even a redirect to a non-existant page to produce a 404 page so the whole site can be reindexed from scratch?

The site currently doesn't have much traffic so even if it takes time for the search engines to sort it out thats not a problem.

[defanjos]

301 redirect all pages like [domain.com...] to [domain.com...]

Make sure there aren't any internal links to pages like [domain.com...]

[johnhh]

defanjos

Thanks for the advice.

We have already done the internal rewrite so that works OK - just dealing with the external- slowly!

What would be the best to do where we added another variable

For example:
www.oursite.com/search.asp?var1=one&var2=two is the current page ( also google indexed)
but now the extra variable is in the page becomes www.oursite.com/search.asp?varr1=one&var2=two&var3=three which rewrites to www.oursite.com/one/two/three.html
but the original still works even with the missing variable - just misses the one extra bit of data out of the page when the page is shown.

So possibly we don't want to redirect these and just create a 404?

Not sure I am explaining myself too well here...any advice much appreciated - as I have just had to learn about iis rewrite from scratch.

[pageoneresults]

Can you hide the variables? This is getting a little out of my league but on an ISAPI project I worked on a few years ago, there were approximately 6-8 variables in the URI string before ISAPI_Rewrite.

After ISAPI_Rewrite that was trimmed down to 4 distinct sub-directories. I believe it was done by hiding the variables.

[johnhh]

pageineresults

"little out of my league" is true for us as well.
I will try and do some research on "hiding variables" may turn out to be a good tip.

[defanjos]

What would be the best to do where we added another variable

I would treat it exactly like the pages with two variables - 301 them also.

You can have a rule written that can do all the redirects from:
[domain.com...] to [domain.com...]
and from:
[domain.com...] to [domain.com...]

I would help you with the rule if I could, but I don't know much about writing them.

Are you using a product like isapi_rewrite? If so, ask for help on their forum. They are usually very helpful.
Good luck.