URL Duplicate Content Issues (Website Transition)
-
Hey guys,
I just transitioned my website and I have a question. I have built up all the link juice around my old url styles. To give you some clarity:
My old CMS rendered links like this: www.example.com/sweatbands
My new CMS renders links like this: www.example.com/sweatbands/
My new CMS's auto-sitemap also generates them with the slash on the end. Also throughout the website the CMS links to them with the slash at the end and i link to them without the slash (because it's what i am used to). I have the canonical without the slash.
Should I just 301 to the version with the slash before google crawls again? I'm worried that i'll lose all the trust and ranking i built up to the one without the slash. I rank very high for certain keywords and some pages house a large portion of our traffic. What a mess! Help!
-
Hi Paul, did you find a good way to automatically do the trailing slash redirect?
-
Paul--you may be able to automate this using the rewrite module or just a few lines of PHP. Check out the SEOmoz "how to" for 301 redirects. Scroll down to the "SEO Best Practices".
The article advises that the fastest way to make the switch is to use the PHP header function. If you aren't using PHP (like wordpress or Joomla) than look at the instructions for editing the .htaccess file.
It's a little dense, but hopefully this can save you hours of manually typing in the new URLs in a text doc
-
thank you - Apache.
-
Paul--there are some automated options to avoid rewriting the lines by hand. What kind of server are you running? Windows? Linux? Let me know and I'll try to throw a script your way.
-
Josh, Thank you. I was going in that direction but just wasn't sure. I'm gunna have to add a lot of slashes here in a minute. Anyone else have any input?
-
Paul,
I understand your situation seems messy! Good news though--this should be a relatively simple fix.
A 301 redirect by definition preserves all your link juice. IMO, you should 301 all of the "no slash" pages to the ones with slashes. This will keep your site consistent as you continue to produce content under the new CMS.
As for canonical: technically it won't make a difference, but as a best practice, I would change the canonical page to the one with the slash. This avoids calling attention to a page that will ultimately redirect. Since the new "slash" page is going to inherit all of the "no slash" link juice (via 301), it is appropriate to label it as "canonical".
Even if you were to see a slight fluctuation in your ranking, don't be alarmed--nothing will have changed in the eyes of the search engine.
In short: 301 to your heart's content and keep producing good content.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Website indexing issues
My website is being indexed with both https - https with www. and no leader at all. example. https//www.example.com and https//example.com and example.com 3 different versions are being indexed. How would I begin resolving this? Hosting?
Technical SEO | | DigitalRipples0 -
What is best practice for fixing urls that have duplicate content, non-static and other issues?
Hi, I know there are several good answers regarding duplicate content issues on this website already, however I have a question that involves the best way to avoid negative SEO impacts if I change the urls for an ecommerce site. Basically a new client has the following website http://www.gardenbeauty.co.uk and I notice that it suffers from duplicate content due to the http://www version and the non www version of the pages - this seems quite easy to fix using the guidance on this website. However I notice that the product page urls are far from ideal in that they have several issues including:- (a) they are mostly too long (b) don't include the keyword terms (in terms of best practice) (c) they don't use Static URLS An example of one these product urls would be http://www.gardenbeauty.co.uk/plant-details.php?name=Autumn Glory&p_genus=Hebe&code=heagl&category=hebe I'd like to address these issues, but the pages rank highly for the products themselves, therefore my question is what would you recommend I do to fix the urls without risking the high positions that many of these product pages have? thanks, Ben
Technical SEO | | bendyman0 -
How do I fix issue regarding near duplicate pages on website associated to city OR local pages?
I am working on one e-commerce website where we have added 300+ pages to target different local cities in USA. We have added quite different paragraphs on 100+ pages to remove internal duplicate issue and save our website from Panda penalty. You can visit following page to know more about it. And, We have added unique paragraphs on few pages. But, I have big concerns with other elements which are available on page like Banner Gallery, Front Banner, Tool and few other attributes which are commonly available on each pages exclude 4 to 5 sentence paragraph. I have compiled one XML sitemap with all local pages and submitted to Google webmaster tools since 1st June 2013. But, I can see only 1 indexed page by Google on Google webmaster tools. http://www.bannerbuzz.com/local http://www.bannerbuzz.com/local/US/Alabama/Vinyl-Banners http://www.bannerbuzz.com/local/MO/Kansas-City/Vinyl-Banners and so on... Can anyone suggest me best solution for it?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Duplicate homepage content across multiple websites
Hi, I work for a company that runs 30+ membership based websites on separate domains and across multiple markets. The homepage for each site contains a section of content that highlights the site benefits and features. While each website serves a different market/niche, this section of content is essentially the same as each website offers the same benefits and features. What is the best way to avoid duplicate content issues while still being able to show the same section of content across 30+ sites? This particular section of content isn't valuable from an SEO perspective, but the rest of the content on that page is. Any ideas or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | CupidTeam0 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hi, I just had my site crawled by the seomoz robot and it came back with some errors. Basically it seems the categories and dates are not crawling directly. I'm a SEO newbie here Below is a capture of the video of what I am talking about. Any ideas on how to fix this? Hkpekchp
Technical SEO | | mcardenal0 -
Duplicate Content
We have a ton of duplicate content/title errors on our reports, many of them showing errors of: http://www.mysite.com/(page title) and http://mysite.com/(page title) Our site has been set up so that mysite.com 301 redirects to www.mysite.com (we did this a couple years ago). Is it possible that I set up my campaign the wrong way in SEOMoz? I'm thinking it must be a user error when I set up the campaign since we already have the 301 Redirect. Any advice is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Ditigal_Taylor0 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Content
Hi All, I am getting warnings about duplicate page content. The pages are normally 'tag' pages. I have some blog posts tagged with multiple 'tags'. Does it really affect my site?. I am using wordpress and Yoast SEO plugin. Thanks
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Client has 3 websites, for various locations & duplicate content is a big issue...Is my solution the best?
Hi guys, I have a client who has 3 websites all for different locations in the same state in Australia. Obviously this is not the best practice but in the meeting he said that each area is quite particular about where they do business. What he means is that people from one area want to do business with a website from that particular area. He has 3 domains and we have duplicate content issues. We are solving these at the moment with the canonical tag however they are redesigning the site soon. My suggestion is that we have 1 domain and sub domains for the other 2 areas. This way the people from that area will see the company is from their area. Also this way we have 1 domain to optimise and build domain authority for. Has anyone else come across this and is my solution the best for this? Thanks! Jon
Technical SEO | | Jon_bangonline0