Long URL Trouble

Looking at the pages indexed, I see two issues which Autocrat has already mentioned (thanks, Autocrat!) that I'd like to expand on:

1. Long & crazy URLs
I ran into this URL while looking at -site:gadgetguy.com.au- :
http://www.gadgetguy.com.au/small-kitchen-appliances-toaster-kettle-c

Now I'm all for having descriptive URLs, but . this seems to be taking it a bit too far and I have a bit of trouble identifying anything that matches in the content of your page.

The problem with URLs like this is that they almost appear to be random and in fact I can get exactly the same page by using something like: http://www.gadgetguy.com.au/xyzzy-42.html . In general, you should make sure that you have only one URL that leads to your content
" all others should either redirect to the proper URL or return HTTP result code 404 to signal that the URL is invalid. Without that, your site is leading us (and all other crawlers) on a wild goose chase.

If your CMS is not able to handle this properly (one URL per piece of content), I would recommend not using rewritten URLs so that we can recognize and skip over unimportant parameters in your URL query string.

This may seem to be an overkill, but, better to work the way Google advises you, rather than running around with a 'reconsideration request'.

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