Hi. I had trouble with google indexing and crawling my deeply linked pages and I think it had lots to do with the fact I had almost 6 variables for each page. I ended up switching everything using mod_rewrite and now I have something like: http://www.vacationreviews.net/map.php?Country=Germany&City=Berlin became: http://www.vacationreviews.net/map/Germany/Berlin/ The trouble is that google now seems to have indexed about 5 pages with these variables in them.. if you do a site:vacationreviews.net you will see what I mean. I do not have anymore links with variables in them, and I have updated my sitemap to reflect this. What I am worried about is that there is the same content at both of these links. Will google penalize me for this? How can I correct this? I am concerned because when the pagerank updated I went from a 1 to a 0 . Any tips or suggestions would be appreciated. PS I know I don't have enough content.. I'm going to insert a lot of new pages soon.
Mod-rewrite is a good idea for larger site with dynamic urls, but some sites (even with many variables) still do not NEED to implement one in order to get good rankings (even on deep pages). Most times though, it is still a good idea to do since it also helps users who may want to store a particular page for future reference or just to make it easier for them to read the url they are viewing. A lot of ecommerce sites have one in place for their many product pages and category structuring. I get what you are trying to do and I think you made a good decision regarding your site, but there are a few things that can help the SE's find your new urls that you can do (switching them on your site map is a start and a good thing). You can also redirect the old urls to the new ones via .htaccess and a 301 permanent redirect. Sometimes I have heard of webmasters doing a manual removal request for the old ones, but usually that is not needed. Make sure you re-submit the site map and that it is crawled regularly by all three major SE bots in order to get the old pages out and the new ones in quicker. Make sure internal links on the rest of the site reflect the new url structure and that all inbound links to re-written pages are also in the new structure. You shouldn't have to worry about the duplicate content on the old and new pages, but it may be a problem if bots have a hard time finding the new urls. Taking the steps above should help to get the new urls discovered faster and having a redirect from the old urls to the new ones will also benefit you if you have links pointing at those old pages still (you won't loose visitors). You may want to add a custom 404 not found page to direct any users back to your site if they are finding the outdated urls and there is not content to view anymore. BTW, I found this post using Search Engine Feeds!