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Aug. 23, 2007

Yahoo announces a new Site Explorer feature that enables webmasters to inform Yahoo about dynamic URLs that could attempt to create duplicate content and similar issues.

For many years now, duplicate content problems have haunted most webmasters and site owners, and trying to reduce or eliminate them has become more and more challenging as search engines keep changing their ranking algorithms.

Yahoo's new feature is named "Dynamic URL Rewriting" and it allows webmasters to view potential duplicate content problems and have Yahoo rewrite those URLs at the index level.

After that, Yahoo then allows you to define which URL is the primary and the remaining URLs will be dynamically rewritten to that primary URL.

In many practical cases, duplicate content can often be generated simply by accident by having automated dynamic URLs. The URLs can append characters to the URLs such as session ids, tracking parameters, format modifiers and other parameters that do not change the content of the page at all, but yet create a totally new unique looking URL.

For the past couple of years, professional and knowledgeable SEOs have been detecting these duplicate URLs problems and have been effectively using rewriting technology to inform search engines of the real and original (primary) URL.

Yahoo's new new tool will enable webmasters to easily identify such URLs and classify the primary versions of the URLs as the real ones, avoiding potential duplicate content issues.

Overall, if webmasters set up a tracking URL for a banner ad such as www.domain.com/?ad_id=5678, which is basically a duplicate URL of another one just like it, now webmasters can inform Yahoo that anything that has the "ad_id" parameter following the (?) will be a duplicate URL to the primary, and Yahoo will simply rewrite that URL to be the actual default to the primary.

Overall, Yahoo offers webmasters two options with its new tool:

(1) Remove the parameters from the URLs, such as in session IDs you could ask to remove 'sid' from the URLs
(2) Use a default value for the parameter, for example you could set the 'src' parameter to be 'yhoo_srch'

It seems you can apply up to three parameters for the rewriting or removal in this new tool.

On average, Yahoo has done a pretty good job explaining how its new tool works and its new features for the Internet and SEO community.

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Source: Yahoo