identical content served from 2 different url's

from the same site though. Is it legal?

[chrisandsarah]

Hello
Am really worried, so wondered if anyone could help.

My site outgrew itself recently so we've had to make changes to the url structure.
I have some important url's like this: www.mysite.com/bluewidgets/, Yet now with the expansion of the site and url structure change (had to be done) we also have urls like: www.mysite.com/country1/bluewidgets/ which serves up identical content to the above first url.
Is this bad? There is no way around it, cause if i dump my old url (i have 50 important ones kept) I will have to get around 6,000 webmasters to change my link url on their pages, which i dont want to have to do.
My programmer says it wont be a problem with google etc, but i'm worried. I rely on this site for my income.
Is it possible to stop google from crawling and most importantly listing the 50 url's in the new format? So it sticks with the old ones? Or is it possible to have 50 redirects from the new url's to the old ones? How do i get round this? The problem is, because the site is very much database driven, i have no way of making it use the old format url's for the 50 in question. I hope this all makes sense. Thanks for any help,

Chris and Sarah

[capmexbiz]

This can be seen as spam.

Just change your robots file. You need to disallow access to crawlers to those country folders, also you could add a meta tag to those documents not allowing robots to index duplicate pages.

This is the code for the meta tag:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

Edgard Durand
<<snip>>

[edited by: vitaplease at 8:00 pm (utc) on Oct. 21, 2004]
[edit reason] no signature urls please [/edit]

[GodLikeLotus]

Wish I could put that tag on the index page of the guy who stole my entire site.

[jtbell]

if i dump my old url (i have 50 important ones kept) I will have to get around 6,000 webmasters to change my link url on their pages, which i dont want to have to do.

That's what permanent redirects (HTTP status code 301) are for.

[AjiNIMC]

I couldnt understand everything about the problem as I read it in a hurry , what I can sniff is you have

1) site.com/dir/

and

2) site.com/country/dir/

If they server same content why are you keeping both? never do that , you will surely get a penalty.

If you want to change from (1) to (2) , the best is use a 310 redirection for the urls in (1)

example

In you page site.com/dir/1.php put this

<?
// send the 301 header to tell the search engine that we have moved permanently
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: /country/dir/1.php");
exit();
?>

This is the right approach.

Have fun
AjiNIMC

[chrisandsarah]

But if i did that, would the new url's lose all the backlinks my old urls had? Or would PageRank and Backlinks carry through? Thats all i'm worried about, losing my great rankings.
So EG
If i did a 301 from
www.mysite.com/old/ (which has 1000's of backlinks and is highly placed in serps)
to
www.mysite.com/new/
would www.mysite.com/new/ lose that precious backlink count and PR etc?

Thanks for the help

[chinkchink]

i have a thread going about similar 301 issues:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[girish]

Godlikelotus=
"Wish I could put that tag on the index page of the guy who stole my entire site. "

I have similar duplicate page issue...But with a twist...

My competitor stole 50 pages, exact content,

When I paste a 15 word snippet from the top of my page into G search -- My page shows up #1 and my competitor's page shows #2

But if I search for a snippet of 15-20 words from the middle or bottom of the page in question, He shows up #1 and I do not show in top 100 SERPS.

This true for 25 pages I've tested