has someone the patience to explain suplimentals in easier terms

[flanok]

Hi,
I have been studying the posts on how to deal with suplimental pages, but because of my lack of knowledge I keep getting lost in the terminology that I dont understand. e.g I know what a 301 direct is but I dont know what an "internal rewrite is" or an "external redirect"
Can someone help me with my suplimental issue, but assume I only know the basics.

I have a site with most of its pages in suplimental, this site is no 1 in the other search engines for quite a competative search term in the UK.

The suplimentals can be spilt 3 ways
1/ Duplicate page content that I have used from article sites
2/ My own written content but what I asume to be pages deemed as " too simlar" by the G.
3/ Pages where I have not got a clue why they are suplimental except over optimisation. i.e anchor text from homepage that matches title and url of the page. (this is a guess)

I have been
1/ rewriting all articles, in my own words but on a similar subject.
2/ Rewriting all "too similar pages"
and
3/ trying to "unoptimise" the rest.

After reading the posts here, I have now learned that it is unlikely that these rewritten pages will ever be spydered again and will eventually drop off the index in a year and so wating my time.
I don't want to delete all the pages as I believe they are helping my rankings in the othere SEs.

This is just a standard Html site.
What do I do in simple terms.
many thanks for your patience.
Mark

[g1smd]

An internal rewrite is when you ask for A and the server goes and gets B and gives you the content of B and doesn't tell you that it went elsewhere for it.

An external redirect is when you ask for A and the server responds with "go get it from B". The browser then re-requests the data directly from B - and gets it.

As for the other, does this help? [webmasterworld.com...]