Page No Longer There

But the SE's say it is

[randle]

Hope a wise person can assist us with a problem we have.

We have a glossary feature on our website that generated different information based on the query string, for example:

domain.com/glossary.php?page=A

would give a page of all words begining with the letter A.

Google indexed each one of those pages, so we have 26 pages (one for each letter) of content. Recently we pared down and consolidated our glossary into one page, so all words, A-Z, appear on one page, example.com/glossary.php

So it would seem now that we have 27 pages of duplicate content (example.com/glossary.php, example.com/glossary.php?page=A, example.com/glossary.php?page=B, etc). We'd like Google to stop indexing any pages with a query string. To do this, we were thinking of checking for the query string on /glossary.php and, if it was there, writing a meta NOINDEX tag to be served to the googlebot. Would this acheive our goal of actually getting those listings with the "?page=" out of the index?

If not is there another or better way?

Thanks in advance.

[FalseDawn]

Are you still serving the same page, though?
If you are not serving a 404, I would display a "page no longer exists" type message, as well as using the "noindex" meta.

The best solution would probably be to serve a 404 where the param is supplied.

[LeChuck]

No.

The best solution would be to serve a 410 Gone.

[FalseDawn]

Yes, you are correct, a 410 would be better.

[whoisgregg]

Or you can use a 301 redirect when googlebot visits with a query string. In theory, that means any links pointing to /glossary.php?page=A would "count" towards /glossary.php.

Added: And serving a 301 is more accurate, what used to be at /glossary.php?page=A has permanently moved to /glossary.php. It isn't "not found" or "gone" it's just in a different place.

[randle]

Are you still serving the same page, though?

Yes, thats our concern, now we have 20 something pages that are exactly the same.

Thanks for the help guys