Double navigation penalty with Google?

[cpd]

Would I be screwing myself if I essentially had my site's navigation be indexed twice (3 times with the sitemap) by Google?

I have an ecommerce site with a lot of specific navigation links. Every time someone does a search, it creates a new page, adds that page to the sitemap, and adds it to a page called "searches.php". However...the developer that wrote the script for me made it so that it adds the full link set of the sitemap to the searches page as well.

Will that screw me up to have essentially two sets of the same link for every link, or does it not matter? Or should I not worry? Or should I scrap the searches. php page, and let the sitemap.xml page do my indexing work for me?

Thanks.

 

[kblessinggr]

penalty? Not really, but you wouldn't be gaining any extra benefits duplicating an entry in the sitemap either, since google not that dumb. Also even if you were to make the links different to the same content (ie: permalink vs mod_rewrite etc), you'd likely get knocked down a peg for having double content. (kinda like spamming the meta tags).

 

[cpd]

Good points, I'm not trying to game anything, just mainly trying to avoid rewrting the script. Are you saying just go with the sitemap and drop the searches page, or the other way around?

 

[kblessinggr]

Good points, I'm not trying to game anything, just mainly trying to avoid rewrting the script. Are you saying just go with the sitemap and drop the searches page, or the other way around?

Google like many other search engine automatically indexes everything it can link to, A sitemap basically gives google and other engines the official "primary" layout of your site and such (which for some search results shows up as links under your main entry.

IF you are using a CMS such as wordpress, instead of making a sitemap manually you could instead install this plugin WordPress › Google XML Sitemaps WordPress Plugins which will not only update your sitemap every time you post a new page, but notifies google, yahoo, ask.com and MSN search about the update.