Apache Mod rewrite and duplicate content

Hallo,
a simple (?) question for se experts: I intend to apply Apache mod rewrite
to a site in this way:

old URLS -> item.php?id=213&Cat=Furniture&Name=Simple%20Chair
new URLS -> Furniture/213/Simple-Chairhtml

I've tested and both urls are now valid and points both to the same
document, in my site I use the new URLS as links, but in SERP old pages are
still to find.

the problem is, as SE spiders retrieve the new URLS, do they somehow
penalize their rank or importance because of content duplication?

And, is it worth to apply a similar change to relative good ranking pages?

ciao
giacomo

Giacomo wrote:

Hallo,
a simple (?) question for se experts: I intend to apply Apache mod rewrite
to a site in this way:

old URLS -> item.php?id=213&Cat=Furniture&Name=Simple%20Chair
new URLS -> Furniture/213/Simple-Chairhtml

I've tested and both urls are now valid and points both to the same
document, in my site I use the new URLS as links, but in SERP old pages are
still to find.

the problem is, as SE spiders retrieve the new URLS, do they somehow
penalize their rank or importance because of content duplication?

having a single URL point to a single piece of content is a good thing
on a number of levels. Unfortunately with dynamic websites one ends up
with a lot of these canonicals issues, the classic being googlebot
appending random query strings ?id=39804 or such like ad infinitum.

You will have to wait maybe a year for Google to settle down and remove
the old URLs from its SERPS, it is a long haul but worth it.

Regarding penalization. I think the main issue for a single site is not
a penalization as such but that either:-

i. the confusion in naming will lead to unexpected PR distribution
within the site
ii. Google will not crawl parts of the site

On the second point I saw an experiment someone made on WebMasterWorld.
Here it seemed that Google detected a directory had duplicate content
after crawling a few URLs at the top level and simply did not crawl the
rest.

One thing I would suggest is put 301 redirects for all the old URLs
where used. You should be able to do this with a redirectmatch directive
and regular expressions in your case. Remember this is not free and will
put some additional load on your web server.

"Giacomo" <ArturoFunke (AT) tiscali (DOT) it> wrote:

Hallo,
a simple (?) question for se experts: I intend to apply Apache mod
rewrite to a site in this way:

old URLS -> item.php?id=213&Cat=Furniture&Name=Simple%20Chair
new URLS -> Furniture/213/Simple-Chairhtml

I've tested and both urls are now valid and points both to the same
document, in my site I use the new URLS as links, but in SERP old
pages are still to find.

Then you probably didn't specify that you want a permanent redirect (301).

Can you post the rule(s) you use?

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"Giacomo" <ArturoFunke (AT) tiscali (DOT) it> wrote:

Hallo,
a simple (?) question for se experts: I intend to apply Apache mod
rewrite to a site in this way:

old URLS -> item.php?id=213&Cat=Furniture&Name=Simple%20Chair
new URLS -> Furniture/213/Simple-Chairhtml

I've tested and both urls are now valid and points both to the same
document, in my site I use the new URLS as links, but in SERP old
pages are still to find.

Then you probably didn't specify that you want a permanent redirect (301).

Can you post the rule(s) you use?

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([^/])([^/]+)/([^/]+).html Articolo.php?Id=$2&Nome=$3&IdCat=$1
[L]

should I change it to:
RewriteRule ^([^/])([^/]+)/([^/]+).html Articolo.php?Id=$2&Nome=$3&IdCat=$1
[R=301,L]
?
in this way I wil get no problem with SE rankings and duplicate content?
this would be great

thank you

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