Large Number of low PR pages v's fewer pages with higher PR

[Blue Cat Buxton]

I have a site I created ages ago that I am looking at revamping. There is a section where articles are pulled from a database but can relate to more than one category. They way I set the URL's up means that there are a lot of (same content) pages with different URL's.

NB this wasn't mean as search engine spamming, more of a logical way of presenting the articles.

The articles are accessable in the format:

article/1

and also:
article/categoryA/1
article/categoryB/1
article/categoryC/1
etc.

This means I have a good number of pages indexed, but all with lowish page rank. (I am concious now that there is a risk of a duplicate content penalty.)

Is it better to change the urls so that I only have the article/1 format thus cutting quite considerably the number of pages indexed but hopefully increasing each pages PR (as it will be linked from each of the category pages or should I just leave the structure alone?

[Chris]

Yes, combine them under 1 URL.

[ASP-Hosting.ca]

I do have several sites with the same structure (one article visible under many categories) and I keep it that way in order to offer better navigation for my users. I don't think Google or any other search engine will penalize me for something like this.



Peter

[moonshield]

i wouldn't think so, so long as it isn't blatant.

[Chris]

Its not so much about a penalty as it is about getting the most out of your content.

You can still list articles in multiple categories, just make sure each article has a unique URL (this site is setup like that).