How would Google see these 2 urls?

[limoshawn]

http://www.example.com/page?page=1234

AND

http://www.example.com/page?page=5678

would G see those as 2 different pages or would G index both as one?

[edited by: tedster at 2:46 am (utc) on Sep. 3, 2008]
[edit reason] switch to example.com [/edit]

[tedster]

There is no technical definition for "pages" - so Google indexes urls. Those are different urls, so if their content is the same, then you should take steps to have Google index only your preferred address. You can use robots.txt or the robots meta tag, whatever makes sense in your situation.

If two urls are not an exact match, character for character from the first position to the last, then you have the potential for trouble. Some sites cruise along for quite a while with this kind of situation, and Google will willing filter out all but one url for the same content - but only up to a point. Then everything can come crashing down.

[jcmiras]

Obviously, those two urls are different for G's point of view.

[limoshawn]

Those are different urls, so if their content is the same

the content on each page is different ONLY if there is information appended to the end of the url (?page=1234) so i guess my question is: when Google indexes urls do they include the information appended to the end of the url OR do they stop at the "?"

I'm working on user generated content management and i would like to use a template to display the content from a database instead of creating a static page for each user. doing that i want to make sure that each page gets indexed and not just the template.

[wheelie34]

What I usually do at the TOP of the php template is check to see if a variable has actually been sent to the page, if not, use the php

header ("Location: http://www.example.com")

back to the page that would launch the template in the first place.

edit: you should also use nice URL's these days so the ? string isn't seen

[tedster]

do they include the information appended to the end of the url OR do they stop at the "?"

Google, and any other search engine, does includes the characters that follow the "?" character. Only the "#" character marks the end of the unique url, since it identifies only a fragement of the document.

[limoshawn]

thanks Tedster