3 Different Home Page URL's Being Indexed?

[k9byron]

Hello Everyone!

I own a dog supplies eCom site on the x-cart platform. I recently upgraded to 4.4 version about 3 weeks ago and am noticing 3 different home page URL's getting indexed and ranked:

/
/home.php
/home.php?cat=

I dont know why this is happening and I dont claim to be an expert SEO but know this cant be good! I am seeing high rankings on certain terms for all 3 URL's. Has anyone seen this before and can anyone give me any feedback on this and how it may be effecting my sites ranking in the future?

Thanks in advance!
Byron-

[AlanBleiweiss]

I'm not a dev.  Personally I stay at least ten feet away from any code when possible

I'll respond to the site form rather than here regarding SEO services... no longer an independent consultant...

[k9byron]

Good stuff! Thanks again, Bevelwise!!

[k9byron]

Thanks again Alan. i will send this to my dev. and see if he can do what you say. If not, do you do this sort of thing? Actually, I just spent most of my budget (and then some!) on the new site but will need an SEO to take a look at it soon.

I actually went to your site and filled out the form as I am interested in more backlinks

[Bevelwise]

Duplicate content is never a good thing and can be handled a number of different ways.  In this case I would do a number of things to make sure you are not causing confusion and ultimately segmenting out the link profile between multiple url's.  I would

• 301 redirect /home.php to /
• Install a canonical tag on the home page
• If you don't already have your Google webmaster tools registered go do that, and then under site configuration use parameter handling tell Google to ignore the query string parameter ?cat= and set that to ignore.

Even though you are getting multiple versions of your home page ranked, are they for different keywords?  I believe that if you fixed the duplicate content issues you would retain your rankings with your consolidated home page.

[AlanBleiweiss]

while you may be seeing a short-term advantage to leaving all versions untouched, having multiple versions of any individual URL indexed ultimately causes long term confusion and degradation to the site's overall SEO.

In X-Cart, you can either use an SEO redirect plug-in or have a custom .htaccess file created to resolve this.  Either one requires a proper understanding of SEO, specific to this type of ecommerce system.