Printer-friendly pages and googlebot

Danger of dupes?

[ExpLarry]

Recently I added a function to my site which generates a printer-friendly version of each page, i.e. with a white background, no left or right columns etc. It is invoked by adding a parameter to each URL, e.g.

www.example.com/Example.html?mode=print

This is purely a visitor-friendly thing because I know people print some of my pages (I have no problem with that), and I wasn't thinking about SEO when I implemented it.

However, it looks like the googlebot has picked up some of these links, although the few that have only seem to have the freshbot tag. In times gone by I would have been happy to see this, but it occurred to me I might appear to be producing duplicate content with all the dire consequences that may or may not have.

Anyone have any idea whether I might be shooting myself in the foot with this?

[troels nybo nielsen]

The dangers in duplicate content are hugely overrated by many webmasters. If duplicate content is the only problem with your site there should not be anything to fear. One page will simply be lower ranked than the other.

<added>
Forgot to mention that this very page has got a printerfriendly version!
</added>

[bull]

A safe solution could be the following:
Instead of a link to

www.example.com/Example.html?mode=print

place a link to

www.example.com/print/Example.html

then redirect/rewrite

www.example.com/print/Example.html

internally via .htaccess mod_rewrite (don't know how works on M$ platforms) to

www.example.com/print/Example.html?mode=print

.
As I have heard that "noindex" is sometimes not respected, all this junk above has the only purpose of creating a virtual directory /print/.

Then disallow /print/ for Googlebot etc. in robots.txt.

Sorry, I have not tested that, but that's how I would do it. A CSS-only sulution is not sufficient four your purposes?

[ExpLarry]

A safe solution could be the following:
Instead of a link to

www.example.com/Example.html?mode=print

place a link to

www.example.com/print/Example.html

then redirect/rewrite
www.example.com/print/Example.html internally via .htaccess mod_rewrite (...) to www.example.com/print/Example.html?mode=print.

I think I will do something along these lines. Having thought about it I can't see any SEO benefits from the print version, and that will give me one less potential problem to worry about.

Fortunately the website is largely dynamic and tweaking the app to provide virtual directories is easy (wrote it myself, ha ;-).

(don't know how works on M$ platforms)

Maybe I should interrogate one of those worms which keep hitting my servers to see if they have any idea;-).

A CSS-only sulution is not sufficient four your purposes?

Ah, good idea. This is coincidentally the first site I've produced which uses CSS for layout. However I use the print version to display some ads in a different format (never waste a PI ;-), which requires different ad-code.

[otech]

its funny you should mention this, i have a printer friendly version of my pages on my site, and they all ended up URL only listings. Same with the links to the 'add to basket' script on my site.

I have added no-index to all the print pages but they are still in the index as url only...

i dont really mind though, they should be url only as the web versions are all ranking well. In a way its good because my dose of url only listings are mostly on these pages...