Oh, and re: the idea of internal URL shorteners, Google's suggestion for rel=canonical http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonica

Oh, and re: the idea of internal URL shorteners, Google's suggestion for rel=canonical http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y... is a way to allow those to exist without destroying your pagerank. However, I'm not seeing them too widely implemented yet.