Is it a problem to have a homepage with a slug / URL ?
-
Hi,
We are designing a web site for one of our clients, and using a home made CMS.
I don't know how this CMS has been built, but anyways, in the end the homepage has a URL format which looks like this : www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html. No www.mydomain.com.
Is it dangerous for SEO to have a slug/URL directly on the homepage ? Do you have experiences, cases where it has impacted a site negatively ?
The main problem I expect is duplicate content (with Google seeing both www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html as being different pages) but apparently the CMS is doing a 302 redirect from the root domain to the URL (I told my colleague it should at least be a 301).
Sorry if this question seems like basic SEO knowledge, but I really can't find a definitive answer on the subject.
Thank you very much
-
Is it possible for the CMS to include the canonical tags ? I would suggest you look into it and have www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html contain the canonical tag to www.mydomain.com which should also take care of this issue for the homepage. That way Google will deindex www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html and only index www.mydomain.com
-
Yes this is a big problem. You are showing Google, 2 pages with the same content. This would be the case if this were any two pages with the same content on your site.
You definitely need to setup a 301 redirect (and not a 302) the slug to the main page.
You have to be careful with CMS systems. They may be generating a ton of duplicate pages and you are not even aware of it. Check with you IT person, but then look in Google Webmaster Tools and also use other tools to check (e.g spidering tools).
You want each URL on your site to have a unique title tag, description and page content on your site.
Good luck!
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
-
Google is indexing bad URLS
Hi All, The site I am working on is built on Wordpress. The plugin Revolution Slider was downloaded. While no longer utilized, it still remained on the site for some time. This plugin began creating hundreds of URLs containing nothing but code on the page. I noticed these URLs were being indexed by Google. The URLs follow the structure: www.mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/revslider/templates/this-part-changes/ I have done the following to prevent these URLs from being created & indexed: 1. Added a directive in my Htaccess to 404 all of these URLs 2. Blocked /wp-content/uploads/revslider/ in my robots.txt 3. Manually de-inedex each URL using the GSC tool 4. Deleted the plugin However, new URLs still appear in Google's index, despite being blocked by robots.txt and resolving to a 404. Can anyone suggest any next steps? I Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Sudden Indexation of "Index of /wp-content/uploads/"
Hi all, I have suddenly noticed a massive jump in indexed pages. After performing a "site:" search, it was revealed that the sudden jump was due to the indexation of many pages beginning with the serp title "Index of /wp-content/uploads/" for many uploaded pieces of content & plugins. This has appeared approximately one month after switching to https. I have also noticed a decline in Bing rankings. Does anyone know what is causing/how to fix this? To be clear, these pages are **not **normal /wp-content/uploads/ but rather "index of" pages, being included in Google. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Canonical homepage link uses trailing slash while default homepage uses no trailing slash, will this be an issue?
Hello, 1st off, let me explain my client in this case uses BigCommerce, and I don't have access to the backend like most other situations. So I have to rely on BG to handle certain issues. I'm curious if there is much of a difference using domain.com/ as the canonical url while BG currently is redirecting our domain to domain.com. I've been using domain.com/ consistently for the last 6 months, and since we switches stores on Friday, this issue has popped up and has me a bit worried that we'll loose somehow via link juice or overall indexing since this could confuse crawlers. Now some say that the domain url is fine using / or not, as per - https://mza.bundledseo.com/community/q/trailing-slash-and-rel-canonical But I also wanted to see what you all felt about this. What says you?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Question/Concern about URL structure
Hey! I have some doubts concerning structuring a websites URL’s and what would be the best practise for this case. The site has 4 (main) categories with a maximum of 4 products in each category. For example: domain -> category (natural-stones) -> product (flooring) Which I would give the follow url: www.companysite.com//natural-stones/flooring Nothing odd so far, but here is the tricky part: the category isn’t an actual page a user wouldn’t be able to visit. The category is just an item in the mainmenu. If a user hovers over the category in the main menu they will get a dropdown in which they can select a product. E.g. flooring, wall strips etc. My question is: Is the url structure as I suggested: www.companysite.com//natural-stones/flooring the best practise. Even though the category isn’t an actually page. Or would it be better to structure the site: www.companysite.com/flooring My concern with this type of structure would be that the site would seem ‘flat’ with in-depth structure. Or would a third (and maybe best?) option be to create an actual page for the category itself. Thanks for taking the time to help me with my question/concern. If you need more information let me know.
Technical SEO | | RvG0 -
Formatting dynamic urls?
We have a long-time previously well-established website that was hit by panda. On one section of the site, we have dynamic urls that include %20 in them (e.g. North%20America). It's recently come to our attention that google has both a version of the url with a plus sign (+) and the version with the %20 (space) (e.g. North+America). Upon researching this, it seems that a hyphen (-) is preferable to either of the above. We obviously need to remove the %20's from the urls as they can cause issues. So, should we stick with the + sign since it's already indexed and ranking or do a 301 rewrite and change them all to hyphens instead of the plus sign? This is the one section of the site that has maintained rankings through the panda debacle, so we need to take that into consideration as we don’t want to lose the rankings that we have. Along the same lines, we have two other sections of the site that provide search results as well, though these are all formatted to use a plus sign. Is it advisable to do a 301 rewrite to change the plus signs to hyphens on these as well or just leave them alone? This particular section has lost rankings over the last year with panda updates.
Technical SEO | | Odjobob0 -
Google description problem
Hi all, My website is www.ipbskinning.com I'm having a problem with how my site is appearing in google. I have this in the head of my website: <meta name='<a class="attribute-value">description</a>' content='<a class="attribute-value">Free and Custom IPB Skins for Invision Power Board.</a>'/> Yet when I google 'ipbskinning' it says: Solid Skins. 1We test all our skins in all browsers to insure that they are compatible. This ensures that your users have the best user experience. which is random text from the content of my site. Any idea why this is happening? Thanks a lot all
Technical SEO | | pezza34340 -
Problem With Video Sitemap Becuase All Videos Are in he Same URL
Hi, I created a video sitemap and now I'm getting an error on webmaster tools because the location for some of the videos is the same. It says: Duplicate URL - This URL is a duplicate of another URL in the sitemap. Please remove it and resubmit. What can I do if all my videos are located in the same URL?? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tug-Agency0 -
Url re-write / minimal subfolders
<colgroup><col width="411"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | Diana.varbanescu
| One of the most common warnings on our site www.sta.co.uk is the use of parameters in URL strings (they're crawled ok, it's mainly duplication content issues we're trying to avoid). The current traffic manager suggested ‘stage 1’ - remove the unwanted folder structure but wouldn’t tailor the dynamic url I'd say it is difficult to quantify what result this would have in isolation and I would rather do this update in tandem with the ‘stage 2’ which adds structure to the dynamic urls with multiple parameters.(Both stages will involve rewriting the page url and redirecting the long url to the short) Any thoughts, please? Is there any benefit in removing the subfolders (1) or should we wait and do it in one go? Thanks everyone, |0