technical question about URLs

[naturalinstinct]

Hi Guys,

I have a slight problem and I know there's some clever people round here so I thought i'd try my luck :)

Our site has about 1000 pages lsited in google but most of them are dynamic pages with?itemid=blah&categoryid=blah after the URL. This hasn't stopped google spidering the site furiously but it does stop any of them getting pagerank. The home page is PR4 and other pages linked from it are 3's and 2's except the product catalogue which is dynamic.

I have bought an IIS module called IIS rewrite which will automatically convert URLs like this....

/products/category/productname.htm into the urls it needs. Google will see the nice url but the code will see the old urls.

The thing is the old urls will still work (they need to) and i'm seeing all sorts of complications with duplicate content penalties. I've been thinking about this for a long time and need to tread carefully because our SERPs are getting pretty good and i don't want penalties.

Anyone still awake? right.... any advice?

[ciml]

The Toolbar doesn't show the PageRank if there's a "?" in the URL, but if those URLs were in Google during the crawl(*) before the last PageRank update, then they do have PageRank. As long as they have enough PageRank for the link: search to work, that's a good test to show that they have PR.

.

(*) With the FreshDeepBot I'm not exactly sure what I mean by the crawl before the last update, but it seems the easiest description.

[oodlum]

There shouldn't be any problem with duplicate content. Google will most likely just pick the pages it prefers - in this case the ones with static URLs. Especially when these start to pick up PR.

It should sort it self out after the rewrite mod.