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on my video web page which has rewritten url, I am linking to related videos with non-rewitten urls , this results that google considering it as Duplicate meta descriptions for the pages ,example:

example.com/video/xxxx/tilte-of-video
example.com/viewvideo.php?id=xxxx

does this affects my ranking please

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It's duplicate content. As with all duplicate content, it's not necessarily a direct penalty, but Google will only display one of the duplicate URLs. Google decides. If you are internally linking to the non-rewritten URLs then it is likely that Google will not even see your pretty/user friendly URLs and choose your non-rewritten URLs to display in the SERPs.

If you wish to take advantage of the nice looking / rewritten URLs then 301 redirect from the non-rewritten to the rewritten URLs (and link to these internally).

However, Google does not mind whether your URLs look "pretty" or contain querystrings, it will index both methods equally well (but use one or the other). Users tend to prefer the "pretty" ones.

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    An alternative is the canonical meta tag, but 301 is preferred.
    – DisgruntledGoat
    Jan 9, 2013 at 10:06
  • I tried both methods and I retained the actual solution because of html validation,I have some rewritten urls that invalid the html pages so i preferred this linking type but seems I have to sacrifice html validation
    – Arabee France
    Jan 9, 2013 at 17:53
  • It's hard to imagine how rewritten URLs (especially in the format you posted above) could invalidate the HTML?! But in any case, any URLs that appear in the HTML document should be HTML encoded to avoid any problems.
    – MrWhite
    Jan 9, 2013 at 18:38
  • you're right about the urls ,I have some with mixed arabic and french characters and the arabic part of urls is with spaces causing invalid document and I didn't find the solution for that
    – Arabee France
    Jan 9, 2013 at 22:36
  • Ok, it's hard to know exactly what's going on from a far, but ordinary spaces should normally be encoded as %20 and the attribute value itself should be enclosed in "..". But there could be something else I'm not aware of.
    – MrWhite
    Jan 9, 2013 at 23:16

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