Which duplicate are we penalized for?

[smallbiz]

Hello,

It seems based on prior postings here that we got hit for a duplicate penalty by Google.

I have 2 questions:

- For our affiliates, we pass an affiliate string in the urls that we give them. For example we could give them www.domain.com/page5.asp?affiliate=12345. Of course the same page with just www.domain.com/page5.asp also exists. Would removing the affiliate=12345 upon landing on that page be enough to prevent Google penalty or would the url being out there already be a problem and do we actually have to stop giving these kinds of urls to our affiliates all together?

- We now know that there are unfortunately a few possibilities for duplicate penalty on our site. We had several variations of our domain names forwarding to the same main domain so we stopped that forwarding. We also have 2 trees of navigation ending with the same items with the same tags but different urls and we have not handled that yet. There are also a couple more possibilities. Is there a way to know which duplicate penalty(ies) we got hit for so we can address that one first?

Thank you.