Canonical Issues

[nezona]

Hi Guys,

I have a technical question. Ive started optimising an ecommerce site for a client and come across some duplicate content issues:-

This page:

http://www.bracknelllamps.com/projector-manufacturer/SANYO/70

is actually indexed in Google as:-

http://www.bracknelllamps.com/projector-lamps.php?make=SANYO

Both pages have the same content and I'm guessing the indexed page refers to an old way of navigating the site. As I'm concerned about duplicate content issues, what's the best approach as this seems to be the case for all 'projector manufacturer' pages.

would it be to 301 redirect each manufacturer url (this could take forever with 107) manufacturers or rel="canonical" tag? to show Google which page I want indexing?

Kind Regards

Neil

[AlanMosley]

I believe that you have url rewriting to a friendly url. If so, then you should have a corresponding  301.

There are 3 steps to a creating a url rewrite
The url rewrite itself
The corresponding 301
And 3rd you need to do either one of two things, either create a outgoing rewrite rule that rewrites all old urls as a page is requested by the user, so he sees the new urls, or go thought the site and manually change every url to the new friendly url
If you leave the old urls in the site, you will be getting un-necessary redirects, each redirect leaks link juice, so you should link directly to the new url