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SEO - Pretty URLs and Dynamic URLs at the same time

I was wondering if a site using both pretty urls and dynamic urls will be penalized for duplicate content.

Let's say http://example.com/article/1 is the same as http://example.com/?article=1. Is this bad for SEO?

Extra question: Entering http://example.com/?blabla=qwerty will load the default home page. Is http://example.com/?blabla=qwerty treated as different page than http://example.com ?

What happens if the user enters http://example.com/????article=1, is it different than http://example.com/?article=1? Thanks

Solution

  • Forget end users - if search engine bot can index both the pages then it's bad SEO.

    Let's say if Google is indexing http://example.com/article/1 as well as http://example.com/?article=1 then it will be treated as duplicate content on same site.

    However http://example.com/?blabla=qwerty and http://example.com and all such variations are treated as a single page.

    So it's not bad for SEO, but definitely not a good strategy. Best practice is to redirect http://example.com/?article=1 to http://example.com/article/1.