Redirecting duplicate pages
-
For whatever reason, X-cart creates duplicates of our categories and articles so that we have URLs like this
www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars
www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/or
http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar
http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar/now our SEO guy says that we dont have to redirect these because google is "smart enough" to know they are the same, and that we should "leave it as-is". However, everything I have read online says that google sees this as dupe content and that we should redirect to one or the other / or no /, depending on which most of our internal links already point to, which is with a slash. What should we do? Redirect or leave it as is? Thanks!
-
I agree 100% with Matt. I would also recommend checking your internal links to ensure that they are all following the same format with or without the /.
-
Hi there, URLs with a trailing slash or without a trailing slash..this has been very much discussed and debated in the SEO circles for quite a long time. The fact is you can go with either of these but be consistent with what you go with through out your website. Personally, I would prefer all the URLs ending with a folder name go with a trailing slash and all the URLs that end with file names should end with proper file extension. And for me if anything ends without a trailing slash, it would be a file and not a folder (don't you think I am biased towards static websites?). This issue is very common with dynamic websites and to conclude, as your SEO guy rightly mentioned, there is absolutely nothing to worry about and Google will take care of this issue (rather a common practice or should I call it a mistake?) pretty well. Good luck.
Regards,
Devanur.
-
Redirect the URLs to one version, for a start it will make your site more crawler friendly for search engines so they don't waste time crawling each version of the page fully and also as you mention it will eliminate duplicate content.
Why make Google do extra work? - your site architecture needs to be as clear as possible, so that Google can crawl it efficiently and not have to deal with duplicates..
This link says it all - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html
Here is a recent Q&A from some of the others in the community backing up the fact that you should redirect one version of the URL to eliminate duplicate content
- http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-issue-with-trailing
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
-
Should i be using shortcodes for my my page content.
Hello, I have a question. Sorry if this is been answered before. Recently I decided to do a little face lift to my main website pages. I wanted to make my testimonials more pretty. Found this great plugin for testimonials which creates shortcodes. I love how it looks like, but just realised that when I use images in shortcodes, these are not picked up by search engines 😞 only text is. Image search ability is pretty important for me and I'm not sure if I should stick with my plain design and upload images manually with all alt tags and title tags or there is a way to adjust shortcode so it shows images to search engines. You can see example here. https://a-fotografy.co.uk/maternity-photographer-edinburgh/ Let me know your thoughts guys. Regards, Armands
Web Design | | A_Fotografy1 -
Content thin for new home page been told to change it? any suggestions?
Hi guys, I'm newbie.... I have been told that my home page is content thin, and if I want to rank really well in the search i need to have more relevant content on my homepage - the site is only new 2months and I can see we are now at 39th place in the search, if i make changes to the home page design and add more content will this effect this current ranking?
Web Design | | edward-may0 -
Using (duplicate) content in different contexts
I have three distinct hosting products, each solving three different problems. While these three products have different features in terms of functionality, they are all built on the same platform. Now, in terms of marketing some features of the platform, f.ex. High Availability, is significant to all of the products. How do I go about to include information about this feature on all product pages without getting penalized for duplicate content? Is there a way to tell Google that parts of the content on the pages for product 1-3 is duplicated with intent, or duplicated from f.ex. a page that explains the technical aspects of the platform?
Web Design | | SYSE0 -
Do pages with low PA effect DA?
I was looking into raising my firm's Domain Authority and I had a thought. I was wondering if our very low PA pages are bringing the overall DA down? Our homepage is at 43 currently and the DA is 32. We have quite a few pages and I am trimming a little fat in the deep pages currently. I was wondering what would be the result in terms of DA I am also starting an aggressive initiative to blog more and try to attract links through guest posting and HARO (Hep A Reporter Out). I understand that many people will say DA is not a metric your should necessarily build around. But, while I am fighting for rankings in a very competitive vertical, I assume a higher DA is better, no? From everything I have read on Moz over the years, they say that the DA metric is the one that tries to encompass a multitude of factors, similar to the way something more complex like the Google algorithm does. So, I assumed finding small gains in DA could be beneficial to the site's rankings and traffic I tried to go into detail and get specific here because I know how many bad questions are asked daily. Thanks anyone and everyone for the help, I do thoroughly appreciate the Moz community
Web Design | | BossArrighi0 -
Redirect based on location best practice clarification?
Hi, i have a question that i have seen some other have also had. The question is what is the best practice to serve the location specific page to the user (based on their location)? This post (http://www.seomoz.org/q/redirecting-users-based-on-location) suggests against automatically redirecting the user based on IP address. I guess the primary concern is that Google bot will also be redirected in this case... I see a number of well known sites use automatic redirect based on location. Take Urbanspoon for example (http://www.urbanspoon.com/), they use a 302 redirect to redirect to location specific page. Do they not redirect Google bot? Is there any way to test this? Can creating a rule to exclude crawlers from redirect cause SEO problems? How? Another example that i am somewhat confused as to how it works effectively is groupon.com.au It selects my closest city (i assume using IP), however the URL stays as the root URL. For example, i typed in http://www.groupon.com.au/ and it stays as http://www.groupon.com.au/ with the city chosen as "Melbourne". The canonical url for this page is the root URL (ie http://www.groupon.com.au/). If you then select "change city" and click the same city (ie Melbourne), it redirects to http://www.groupon.com.au/deals/melbourne. Canonical URL of this page is http://www.groupon.com.au/deals/melbourne. How is this not duplicate content? Can you please advise on the best way to redirect (ideally automatically), to provide the best user experience, while still having Google bot able to crawl the site effectively? Thanks
Web Design | | blackrails0 -
Sub-pages with more links than homepage - bad?
Hi,
Web Design | | rayvensoft
I am working on merging a number of my niche websites into a larger site (301 redirects, phased in over a few months). My question/concern is whether google will penalize the main site when it sees that the homepage has almost no links to it, and that about 10-15 sub-pages have a lot of links back to it. Does anybody have experience with this kind of scenario? Will it create a problem? Theoretically I could spend a year or so building up links to the new main page - building the brand - before doing the 301's. The smaller pages still bring in clients, but it is getting hard to maintain that many micro sites. Thanks in advance for any help.0 -
Optimal redirect configuration from a misspelled domain that we own.
We have a handful of inbound links to www.t-chek.com (note the hyphen). Our normal site is www.tchek.com (no hyphen). We own both domains and have some sort of domain-wide redirect set up now. This works fine for traffic, but I suspect it's not optimal for SEO purposes. I came to this conclusion by looking in OSE and noticing that none of the inbound links to www.t-chek.com were also being attributed to www.tchek.com. 2 questions: Is it immediately evident what type of redirect I have in place now, or do I need to figure that out? Is the fix as simple as editing the .htaccess file on the hyphenated domain? I don't have direct control over the hyphenated domain, and I'd like to be able to know exactly what we need to do so I can request help from my IT department. I'd appreciate hearing your wisdom. Thanks!
Web Design | | SheriGolla0 -
What is the optimal URL Structure for Internal Pages
Is it more SEO friendly to have an internal page URL structure that reads like www.smithlawfirm.com/personal-injury/car-accidents or www.smithlawfirm.com/personal-injury-car-accidents? The former structure has the benefit of showing Google all the sub-categories under personal injury; the later the benefit of a flatter structure. Thanks
Web Design | | rarbel0