Rewriting dynamic urls to static

[neooptic]

We're currently working on an SEO project for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/.

After a crawl of their site, tons of duplicate content issues came up. We think this is largely down to the use of their brand filtering system, which works like this:

By clicking on a brand, the site generates a url with the brand keywords in, for example:

http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-cid77.html

filtered by the brand Mammut becomes:

http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-Mammut-cid77.html?filter_brand=48

This was done by a previous SEO agency in order to prevent duplicate content. We suspect that this has made the issue worse though, as by removing the dynamic string from the end of the URL, the same content is displayed as the unfiltered page.

For example

http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-Mammut-cid77.html

shows the same content as:

http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-cid77.html

Now, if we're right in thinking that Google is unlikely to the crawl the dynamic filter, this would seem to be the root of the duplicate issue.

If this is the case, would rewriting the dynamic URLs to static on the server side be the best fix? It's a Windows Server/asp site.

I hope that's clear! It's a pretty tricky issue and it would be good to know your thoughts.

Thanks!

[RyanKent]

I use canonical references on all my pages no matter what. Most professional sites I encounter do as well. You will notice they are used on SEOmoz.

I would use a rewrite rule mainly to do something alone the lines of directing all your non www traffic to their www counterpart. For the type of issue you are working on, I would use canonical tags on every page.

[neooptic]

Thanks for answering so quickly. We were going to add a canonical tag as well to make sure, but I thought a rewrite might be the best bet to start with. Would you do both, or just the canonical?

S

[RyanKent]

Canonicalizing your pages will solve your issue.

You can have a page and present it to visitors with various URLs. What Google needs to understand is which is the primary version of the page. Using your example:

http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-cid77.html

http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-Mammut-cid77.html

You can put the following tag on the pages:

That tag lets Google know that you have a single page which you are presenting to visitors with different URLs. This is a very common practice. For example, you may have a product page and sort it ascending by price, descending by product name, etc. These pages all offer the same content but just presented a bit differently for your visitor's benefit.