is submitting two links for the same page via a sitemap bad form my ranking?

[SZero]

Hey everyone,
I was wondering if adding to links for the same page in a sitemap (or even two different ones) bad for my ranking, to be more clear am running a forum and have to possible links for the topic, either: www.domain.com/topic123.html (or) www.domain.com/topic-title.html
I know the second one is better but would it matter if I add both?
TY

[Nostro]

Thats actually something I've been wondering myself I wonder if its good/bad to list www.domain.com and www.domain.com/index.html in the xml sitemap..

[Jarrod1937]

Google won't necessarily care, but it will only choose one or the other to show. The main issue is that you shouldn't have two url's for the same page, google will not know that inbound links to version 1 should also count for version 2... so as a result you may be splitting your ranking capability between them. You can try using a canonical link tag:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/version1.html" />


That will do a sort of "search engine 301 redirect" and google will try and consider the one that the canonical tag points to to be the main version.