Browse not search

Is browse a mirror site?

[designasp]

Hi

My client has a very user friendly site with valuable content on a product which bought and sold online in great volumes.

The only problem is that the the CMS which runs the website churns out long and complex URLs. Now while the users may not have any problem looking for what they are searching using the search functionality once they are on the site, the search engines are not able to get to the deeper content due to the URLs.

Rewriting URLs is not an option as the server and CMS cannot handle it.

One option I'm looking at for them is to make browse trees based on location and categories which will use search engine friendly URLs to point to the same content that users can get to using the search form. The browse will also be helpful for user to quickly find what they are looking for using browse instead of search.

My SEO question here is: Since the same content is available also by performing search on the site albeit with a much more complicated URL, is the browse tree option going to create duplicate content issues?

Currently the URLs for the pages coming through search forms are not indexed in the search engines due to complexity but they may on an offchance if the algorithms become more sophiscated causing two URLs being indexed for the same content.

In summary, I would like some feedback on these issues:

1] Is creating this browse option "spamming" by having two URLs for the same content?
2] What if robots.txt is used to block the complicated URLs from ever being indexed and therefore having only one URL indexed for the content?
(Although this still means we will have two URLs for the same content, we are making sure search engines are not indexing them both.)
3] Our only goal is here to make the site more user friendly and search engine friendly. If this is going anywhere near spam, it is a no go for us.

Thanks in advance

[jdMorgan]

I think you'll find that many, many sites have this kind of duplicate-URL problem, and certainly not all of them are banned.

You approach seems sound. However, since you'll be using "friendly" URLs, I don't see why you think rewriting is not an option... It seems the logical thing to do.

More here [webmasterworld.com].

Jim

[designasp]

Thanks Jim. Your response confirmed my thoughts on this. URL rewriting is not an option as the CMS used has so much javascript based code which relies on the structure of the URL that the whole site functionality will break down if the URLs are rewritten.

It is not a very well made system. My client knows this and unfortunately does not have budget to move away from this system to use another search engine friendly system currently.

I have had discussions with the developers of the CMS to understand what the issues are but the coding is so haphazard that any changes will cause issues for the existing set up.

Thanks again for your quick reply. It has been of great help.