Caps in URL creating duplicate content
-
Im getting a bunch of duplicate content errors where the crawl is saying
www.url.com/abc has duplicate at www.url.com/ABC
The content is in magento and the url settings are lowercase, and I cant figure out why it thinks there is duplicate consent. These are pages with a decent number of inbound links.
-
I checked and it is a magento feature to rewrite caps to lower case.
I added this to htaccess anyway
<code>RewriteMap lc int:tolower RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z] RewriteRule (.*) ${lc:$1} [R=301,L]</code>
One last question before I take this question to a magento forum - how can I look at a page with a caps URL and lower URL and see if they are really different pages or link to the same address.
When you change random letters to caps in our site it sends you to the right page but my browser still shows the mixed caps url instead of replacing with an all lower url - but is that really a different page or is the browser just not changing the caps display when it is really getting the lower case page ```
-
Hi John,
I checked the URL you sent me. You do have duplicate pages:
http://www.madebysurvivors.com/destiny
http://www.madebysurvivors.com/DESTINY
both work and return the same page..
I also tried clicking on other links on your site, and then just changing a few letters to the upper case something like this
http://www.madebysurvivors.com/LEArn-human-trafficking-slavery
and it returns the same page
From what I can tell its one of the features in Magento that is making this possible. I would go into settings and disable that setting that forces Magento to use lower case.
Then test it make sure that you DO get a 404 page if you change the letter case on any of your links. Once you test it and you do get a 404 page.
I'm not familiar with Magento so not sure if it has that option or not, but many CMS and ecommerce platforms have a field where you can specify the URL for that page, I would change that field to all lower case.
Test it again, if it works there is one more step that you have to do if you want to keep the same juice from the pages that had the uppercase URL.
You need to duplicate your pages, but you need to make sure that the URL address is the same as it was before (in all CAPS) and then do a 301 redirect to the new page which is in lower case.
Hope this helps and makes sense.
-
This is intended functionality in Magento. It's supposed to help the user experience, as a user can navigate to a page even if they aren't sure on the casing of the words.
Of course that's bad for SEO. You'll need to put in the concept of canonicalization. Here's a free extension by Yoast:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/canonical-url-for-magento.html
Cheers.
Update: seeing your response, your solution of putting in redirects wouldn't be possible. You'd have to cover all combinations of caps/non-caps, and well, that's more work than you should want :). As for why this happens, the uppercase character is being lowercased when checking if something in the database matches the URL. Again, this is intended functionality.
-
Looks like I do need some more help.
I get a redirect loop if I enter a redirect from
http://www.madebysurvivors.com/DESTINY
to
http://www.madebysurvivors.com/destiny
but I checked and there is no redirect the other way in our database or htaccess.
If I leave the redirect off I get duplicate content - but in the CMS parts of magento there is only one table for this page.
-
I actually moved all the content from a drupal install so I dont have that many URLs that have the problem. It looks like the faster way to do this is just redirects the caps to lower case as thats what we use elsewhere..
I dug into the underlying database and cant find any duplicate entries for these pages or odd redirects so I have no idea of the cause.
For some of the pages I think you are right that magento is moving caps down to lower, but there are a few others where it is lower to caps - but it was caps in the drupal site.
Anyway -good to know google sees them differently so Ill put in redirects. Its only about 20 pages
-
Hello John,
If you can provide us with a URL we might be able to dig in to see what is going on. Without it its almost impossible to tell. Also it doesn't matter if you have a decent number of inbound links, duplicate content only refers to pages with similar content. I'm not familiar with Magento platform so this is just a guess, when you created (or imported) pages or categories in Magento originally were they lowercased? If not its possible that Magento added them as all in CAPS and Magento might be forcing it to lower case, therefore you might have duplicates, but once again this is just a guess and without a URL to your site I doubt that someone will be able to help you further.
-
www.url.com/abc and www.url.com/ABC are two completely different pages according to Google
I would redirect any and all pages with capitals to the corresponding lower case URL's.
Dont worry about the link juice as it will pass over via the redirect. It will also be much better than having 2 identical pages competing with eachother (according to Google)
Greg
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate Page Content
Hello, After crawling our site Moz is detecting high priority duplicate page content for our product and article listing pages, For example http://store.bmiresearch.com/bangladesh/power and http://store.bmiresearch.com/newzealand/power are being listed as duplicate pages although they have seperate URLs, page titles and H1 tags. They have the same product listed but I would have thought the differentiation in other areas would be sufficient for these to not be deemed as duplicate pages. Is it likely this issue will be impacting on our search rankings? If so are there any recommendations as to how this issue can be overcome. Thanks
Technical SEO | | carlsutherland0 -
Duplicate content issue with Wordpress tags?
Would Google really discount duplicate content created by Wordpress tags? I find it hard to believe considering tags are on and indexed by default and the vast majority of users would not know to deindex them . . .
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Duplicate content problem
Hi, i work in joomla and my site is www.in2town.co.uk I have been looking at moz tools and it is showing i have over 600 pages of duplicate content. The problem is shown below and i am not sure how to solve this, any help would be great, | Benidorm News http://www.in2town.co.uk/benidorm-news/Page-2 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-102 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-103 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-104 9 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-106 28 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-11 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-112 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-114 45 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-115 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-116 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-12 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-120 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-123 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-13 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-130 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-131 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-132 31 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-140 4 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-141 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-21 10 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-22 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-23 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-26 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-271 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-274 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-277 50 21 2 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-28 50 21 2 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-29 50 18 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-310 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-341 21 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-342 4 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-343 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-345 1 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-346 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-348 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-349 50 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-350 50 16 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-351 50 19 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/In2town/Page-82 24 1 0 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town 50 20 1 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-10 50 23 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-100 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-101 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-105 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-107 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-108 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-109 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-110 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-111 50 22 3 In2town http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/in2town/Page-113 |
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Uservoice and Duplicate Page Content
Hello All, I'm having an issue where the my UserVoice account is creating duplicate page content (image attached). Any ideas on how to resolve the problem? A couple solutions we're looking into: moving the uservoice content inside the app, so it won't get crawled, but that's all we got for now. Thank you very much for your time any insight would be helpful. Sincerely,
Technical SEO | | JonnyBird1
Jon Birdsong SalesLoft duplicate duplicate0 -
Problem with duplicate content
Hi, My problem is this: SEOmoz tells me I have duplicate content because it is picking up my index page in three different ways: http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk/ and http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk/index.php Can someone give me some advice as to how I can deal with this issue? thank you for your time, louandel15
Technical SEO | | louandel150 -
Canonical usage and duplicate content
Hi We have a lot of pages about areas like ie. "Mallorca" (domain.com/Spain/Mallorca), with tabbed pages like "excursion" (domain.com/spain/Mallorca/excursions) and "car rental" (domain.com/Spain/Mallorca/car-rental) etc. The text on ie the "car rental"-page is very similar on Mallorca and Rhodos, and seomoz marks these as duplicate content. This happens on "car rental", "map", "weather" etc. which not have a lot of text but images and google maps inserted. Could i use rel=nex/prev/canonical to gather the information from the tabbed pages? That could show google that the Rhodos-map page is related to Rhodos and not Mallorca. Is that all wrong or/and is there a better way to do this? Thanks, Alsvik
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
How do i deal with duplicate content on the same domain?
I'm trying to find out if there's a way we can combat similar content on different pages on the same site, without having to re write the whole lot? Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | indurain0 -
Duplicate content and URL's
Hi Guys, Hope you are all well. Just a quick question which you will find nice and easy 🙂 I am just about to work through duplicate content pages and URL changes. Firstly, With the duplicate content issue i am finding the seo friendly URL i would normally direct to in some cases has less links, authority and root domain to it than some of the unseo friendly URL's. will this harm me if i still 301 redirect them to the seo friendly URL. Also, With the url changed it is going to be a huge job to change all the url so they are friendly and the CMS system is poor. Is there a better way of doing this? It has been suggested that we create a new webpage with a friendly URL and redirect all the pages to that. Will this lose all the weight as it will be a brand new page? Thank you for your help guys your legends!! Cheers Wayne
Technical SEO | | wazza19850