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I agree with sir here as most people consider these URLs are spammed but yeah normally good shorten URLs are 302 so there is no impact of it on the original URL you want your audience to land on! Just a quick participation!

Interesting. I tried it on one of my sites and I just didn't like how glitchy it was. I'll probably wind up doing it the old fashioned way on the rest of my sites.

If you can cut and past the text then as a rule Google can index it. Check out this link for more information right from the horses mouth. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pdfs-in-google-search-results.html

Thanks David I already had the redirect set up in the htacces file. I think the site was crawled before I had added this to the file…total "occam's razor" moment But now there is a few thousand duplicates because of the /catalogue /search etc… I disallowed that all in the robots file so now just have to wait another week!

I'm not sure I will ultimately be able to help answer your question... but I wanted to let you know that your question isn't currently giving enough information for someone to be able to help. What duplicate page content are you referring to exactly?  Title tags?  Content on the pages?  Product descriptions?  Something else? What is the "Magento robots" file?  Probably a robots.txt, but what's it say in the file? You're getting 3616 errors where?  Webmaster Tools?

Adam, keep in mind that if that's low quality content... and you redirect those URLs to somewhere else, then you're passing any links and any potential quality factors over to the new URLs. When Google Panda came out, keep in mind that one of the only ways to recover is to delete the low quality content from your site entirely. So why would you want to redirect that low quality content and pass that on to another URL or another site? I agree with what the others here have said, Casey and Wesley. Think of the user experience.