[thelist] search engine algorithm for query string

rudy r937 at interlog.com
Tue Sep 25 20:52:55 CDT 2001


say i have a web site that i want the search engines to index

so i submit the home page (or sitemap page, it doesn't matter which one,
does it?) and the search engine spider/bot will follow all the links within
the site, and index all the pages it finds

okay, here's the scenario that's giving me fits --

each page, let's take foo.html for example, has, along with navigation
links etc.,  a link to itself with a querystring appended

this link looks like    foo.html?stylesheet=printer

(you can figure out what it does, right?)

okay, now the part i'm not clear about, and the part that's causing
concern, is that i've heard that search engines are
(a) recognizing urls with query strings, and
(b) starting to penalize sites with duplicate content

now, my assumption is that the search engine will be smart enough to
realize that these two urls are actually the same page, and simply discard
one

i mean, the path is the same, the page name is the same, everything's the
same, the content is identical (or 99% identical, just the stylesheet name
in the LINK tag is different)

how could a query string result in penalization?

it would be a different matter if i *submitted* both foo.htm and
foo.html?stylesheet=printer -- i could understand how that might
be considered spamming

but i don't plan on submitting both urls, just the unadorned one

any search engine experts out there?


rudy
http://rudy.ca/







More information about the thelist mailing list