Will shorten URL's result in duplicate penality?

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Will shorten URL's result in duplicate penality?

Will new "shorter" URL's be considered as duplicate?

carlr

6:45 pm on May 3, 2007 (gmt 0)

Just purchased a new website.
The site uses a content management system.
URL's look like this:

www.MYDOMAIN.com/category.php?n=2&page=2&sort=m_in+desc&PHPSESSID=6b34be8dd57c70b750bea9a902

I see that most URL's/pages are well indexed in Google.
Should I put a site map on it, and which URL's should I put in sitemap:

This:
www.MYDOMAIN.com/category.php?n=2&page=2&sort=m_in+desc

Or This:
www.MYDOMAIN.com/category.php?n=2&page=2&sort=m_in+desc&PHPSESSID=6b34be8dd57c70b750bea9a902
(From Google Search Results)

Are those considered same URL's or Different?

Thanks!

jdMorgan

7:19 pm on May 3, 2007 (gmt 0)

They are different - very different.

You should never give a sessionID to a search engine spider, because the next time it makes a request from your site, it will get a different sessionID and interpret it as a different URL, and this will result in massive duplicate content.

Modify your script to allow major search engine spiders to access the site without assigning a session ID, and do not append sessionIDs to on-page links if the "visitor" is a search engine spider.

The implementation details will vary based on what scripting technology you use; After researching your script(s), you might want to ask specific code-technical questions is one of the scripting forums, and more-general questions in the e-commerce forum.

This is a very common problem, so you should be able to get answers easily. You might want to look at the CMS provider's web site -- It's possible there may already be a configuration option you can use to fix this.

Jim