Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
do I get a penalty?
[edited by: tedster at 9:06 pm (utc) on July 24, 2007]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]
It does mean you are creating duplicate content and if you link to both versions you're watering down your site's PageRank when you should be just linking to one version.
Use a redirect on the URL that you don't want people to see, and redirect it to the one that you do. That way, one URL returns "200 OK" and is indexed, and the other one returns "301" and is not indexed. Link internally only to the URL that you want people to see, the one that returns the "200 OK" response.
but why do I need rewriting is it better for the search engines?
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Whatever you do, two URLs that both return the same content and both return "200 OK" as the HTTP status code, are Duplicate Content.
If one of those URLs instead returns a 301 redirect from there to the Canonical URL, then that problem is solved.
1) It helps attract the user's eye when it appears in the SERP - possibly meaning more clicks.
2) Having a keyword in the url is another "relevance signal" to the search engine algorithm.
However, a rewrite such as you described:
www.example.com/detail.aspx?id=23445 >rewrite as> www.example.com/news/11/12/2006.aspx
...is probably not giving you any benefit today. MANY years ago obviously dynamic urls that included a query string after a "?", even with just one parameter, often meant spidering problems for the site. But for several years now search engines in general, and Google in particular, have pretty much gone past that problem. Problems can still come up with more than 3 parameters in a query string, but not just one.
Sop if you are not rewriting to make the url more human readable, including a keyword or two in the file path, then rewriting is not doing much for you except opening you up to duplicate urls if you aren't vigilant.
