When to use mod rewrite / canonical / 301 redirect

[Barques-Design]

Hello,

I have taken over the management of a site which has a big problem with duplicate content. The duplicate content is caused by two things:

• Upper and lower case urls e.g: www.mysite.com/blog and www.mysite.com/Blog
• The other reason is the use of product filters / pagination which mean you can get to the same 'page' via different filters. The filters generate separate URLs.

http://www.mysite.com/casestudy
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy/filter?page=1
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy/filter?solution=0&page=1
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy?page=1
http://www.cpio.co.uk/casestudy/filter?solution=0"

Am I right to assume that for the case sensitive URLs I should use a 301 redirect because I only want the lower page to be shown?

For the issue with dynamic URLs should we implement a mod-rewrite and 301 to one page?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Mat

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi

I would definitely setup a 301 redirect for the case sensitive URLs issue - you may already know how to setup this up but I thought I would include this link - http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/18670/how-to-redirect-any-url-to-lowercase-url

For your pagination issue you need to look at if it is possible to change /casestudy to a "view all" page and then place a canonical link to the /casestudy page in the of each page in the paginated set.

Another option for your pagination is using rel="next" and rel="prev" and for the filter parameters you could  tell Googlebot not to crawl these parameter URLs.

Hope this helps