Handling '?' in URLs.

[craigycraig]

Adios! (or something),

I've noticed in my SEOMoz campaign that I am getting duplicate content warnings for URLs with extensions. For example:

/login.php?action=lostpassword

/login.php?action=register

etc.

What is the best way to deal with these type of URLs to avoid duplicate content penelties in search engines?

Thanks

[DiamondJewelryEmpire]

First of all you are not going to get penalized by that!

You can make this pages nofollow in you robot.txt file. there is no reason for those pages to be indexed.

/login.php?action=lostpassword

/login.php?action=register

Good luck

[craigycraig]

And what is the best way to do that? That is the question I'm really asking...

[krissy-cca]

Add 'noindex, nofollow' robots meta tag to the login page or use a robots.txt file.

More info here > http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html

DD

[craigycraig]

Thanks, but whilst this will work for this example it won't work on pages that I do want indexed but on occasions have a '?' component applied. I want to tell a search engine to not index (and ignore) any '?' componant but still index the native URL.

[G-Force]

Hi Craig,

If you are running Apache with PHP, then you could look into mod_rewrite and do some URL rewriting for your urls to look like /login/lostpassword instead of /login.php?action=lostpassword

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.