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I am having an issue with one of the websites.

Google is reporting that I am having duplicate meta descriptions for few pages. What we did is that we used URL rewrite to rewrite the pages to be more seo friendly. Here is one example with one of our product pages:

Old format:

www.mysite.com/Product.aspx?ProductID=12345&SKU=44412-2212A

New format:

www.mysite.com/Products/12345-44412-2212a.aspx

What we are doing now, when someone will ask for www.mysite.com/Products/12345-44412-2212a.aspx they are taken to www.mysite.com/Product.aspx?ProductID=12345&SKU=44412-2212A but the URL still remains www.mysite.com/Products/12345-44412-2212a.aspx.

But if someone type in www.mysite.com/Product.aspx?ProductID=12345&SKU=44412-2212A, they will see exactly the same page as www.mysite.com/Products/12345-44412-2212a.aspx since the data on the page is same.

What I was thinking is to block product.aspx pages in robots.txt file, but I don't know if that automatically will block Google bots from crawling this page too www.mysite.com/Products/12345-44412-2212a.aspx, since that one is only URL rewritted page from the other page format, www.mysite.com/Product.aspx?ProductID=12345&SKU=44412-2212A.

What do you guys think, how can we tackle this problem, any advice, because GWT is reporting that I have duplicate meta description issue, and those are the pages reported as duplicate, I want to have only one page per product?

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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Use canonical URLs

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Or use 301 redirection to tell Google that your content has been move to the new URL.

header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" ); 
header( "Location: http://www.exemple.com/new_clean_url" );
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You must use rel="canonical".

Open www.mysite.com/Products/12345-44412-2212a.aspx and put canonical in this page source (<head> section).

Link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.com/Products/12345-44412-2212a.aspx".

For more information regarding canonical: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394.

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