2 URLs, same content, 1 with keywords. Does this hurt me?

[JoeCotellese81]

I'm in the process of adding some new features to our site and have a question about our URLs.

Most of our URLs consist of either

sitename.com/contentname or

sitename.com/content/contentid

I'm in the process of building a directory to those pages. The directory has a number of filters which will ultimately point to the destination page.

sitename.com/filter1/filter2/contentid or

sitename.com/filter1/filter2/contentname

The destinations will have references.

From an SEO perspective, I would think I want the filter1/filter2 version of the link indexed since this will add keywords that someone might search for. However, since the filters are dynamic, if someone just searches for contentname I would want to have sitename.com/contentname returned in the search results.

Do I get any SEO benefit out of building those filter links as described if they are not the canonical links?

[AlanBleiweiss]

As an SEO best practice, there should never be more than one version of any page URL.  Even with Canonical implementation, it's only a signal, not a directive, and not all search engines even pay attention to that.  While it's perfectly acceptable to offer filtering options for people to discover content, filters should be blocked from indexing at all cost.  Leaving it up to Google or any search engine to have to figure out which is the original content is not a best practice even though many sites do it, and even though Google says it's okay.

Trying to get one page found simply by inserting different keywords in a URL is also a crap-shoot since that's the only thing that changes about the page itself.  Like buying a keyword exact match domain only to use it as a redirect to the real domain.