A way to prevent duplicate links when...

I've not studied the v4 implementation but I know for a fact that category number, or product number in the v3 product detail page display, is absolutely critical to the SEO mod working.  Indeed, if nothing but the category appears in the URL it works.  The name prior to the category is the one that can go away and have the system still work correctly.

I just removed the category portion of the product link and everything seems fine... What are the implications that I'm not noticing?

I was unable to remove the category number from the sitemap generation, but that can be prevented by omitting categories that you know to have duplicated items in them.

It's good to see that google isn't specifically penalizing people with duplicate content, but i'm not so much worried about them seeing me as someone trying to game the system.

I find it hard to believe that it's okay to point to the same page with many different links. Each of those pages, in google's eyes, would have different URLs. That means the hits to each page would appear less than if they all had the same name.

For example, I have a product t-shirt:

site.com/store/pc/t-shirt-5p123.html gets 50 hits a day
site.com/store/pc/t-shirt-3p123.html gets 50 hits a day

Now each of my pages appears to google to be receiving less hits, when in reality its one page with 100 hits.

Am I the only one who think this might matter?

*edit*

Great response time, btw. I dont run into too many issues and so I rarely post here, but when I do it doesnt take long to get some good advice. It's rare to find something like that.

*another edit*

"We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL."

Just read that on the page... Maybe it solves my problem, i don't know.

Edited by Brett - 11-December-2009 at 8:35pm

The main implication is that ProductCart will not know exactly which category you are in. So the breadcrumb navigation might not be accurate ("might" because ProductCart still attempts to find the category that the product is in by loading the first category assignment it finds in the database).

Edited by earlyimp - 11-December-2009 at 9:53pm

Yes, but you could regard that as academic for anyone that's landed on a product from a search page. Generally they will be looking for the product, not the category, so it won't really matter what the breadcrumb is as long as it shows a relevant category. It's only a problem if you put some products into a random category.