Same URL, different Drupal content types
-
Hi all,
I am working in Drupal which isn't always SEO-friendly. I want to convert some of our articles that are currently in an old article type to our new shiny longform template without losing SEO value. The process we use right now is to:
change the URL of the old article in the CMS from /article-title to /article-title-old
and then make the longform template /article-title in the CMS. Then hit publish. That way we can avoid having to mess with redirects.
My concerns are that this will be seen as a bait and switch by Google. They are, after all, two separate pages — node-1 and node-2 on the back end — that are being smushed into the same skin aka same URL. I don't know if updating to the new template wipes out some of the info Google may have deemed important. I guess you could argue it's a redesign by CMS but I'm still not sure. Thoughts?
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
-
Strange Behavior - Dupe Content Via Query String URLs?
Hey y'all, could use community help with some strange behavior I'm seeing with a particular ranking. A week ago a high volume keyword ranking above the fold dropped off the map. I immediately thought must be an algorithmic penguin penalty (no manual action message) or panda / dupe content issue. I think it's dupe content at this point because I found my former ranking page in the omitted results section for the keyword we used to rank for. The strange thing is that without making any changes, Google would momentarily show our domain ranking high page one again, but with a strange query string URL. At first just domain.com/page/? whereas the old ranking was held by domain.com/page/ but now I see several long query string URLs floating around that the engines don't seem to know what to do with. Canonical tags are in place to canonicalize any query string URL back to the top and I have now designated query string URLs as unimportant in Search Console parameter filtering but these URLs persist. I ended up deduplicating content to a page on another domain we own (think that was the original problem) and there seemed to be a positive effect but now we are top of page 2 with a much longer query string URL as the ranking page. It seems Google wants to rank everything but the former ranking URL even though it's the most authoritative by far, has canonical signals in place, and is now no longer duplicate content. Content checker tool showed 60% similarity to the other piece, which is a ratio I've never known to cause dupe content. We found the source of the query string URLs to be from an external site that has a link to us but it's a buggy site so filtering on the page adds the string to our URL, so Google can find them and thinks they're significant. Long question short, has anyone had trouble like this? Getting weird parameter / query URLs to get out of the index in favor of the non-parameter folder? Is it possible the main folder page got hit with Penguin and is "banned?" Still, I don't know why Google would go out of it's way to rank query string copy pages in its place if that were the case. Any help greatly appreciated. An example of the URL looks like this:
Technical SEO | | Alder
domain.com/page/?CustomerSubscriptionTrack1PageSize=1&CustomerSubscriptionTrack1Order=Sorter_ID&CustomerSubscriptionTrack1Dir=ASC&CustomerSubscriptionTrack1Page=3&WorkOrder_TBLOrder=Sorter_AssetID&WorkOrder_TBLDir=ASC&ID=1060 -
Duplicate content or an update ???
Buying Guide and Product Category page competing for the same keyword ? Got a “nuts and bold website” selling basic stuff. Imagine selling simple nuts, bolts and washers (the little ring that goes in between) in different metals. Imagine a website with a very wide and deep line of these simple products. For long tail keywords we rank well (Example: 0.25 inch bolts). For the keyword: “Nuts bolts” our main category page use to rank well low 1<sup>st</sup> page to second page up against the big guys (Amazon, Walmart, Target, Costco, some drug store who may have a mix pack of nuts and bolts, but still Google don’t see the difference and list 2 pages each for these guys). But then in mid-February there were an update and suddenly our “Buying guide for nuts and bolts” rank higher and started to compete with our own product category page. That was never our intention. These two pages now compete for the ranking on page 4<sup>th</sup>. Clearly there were more words on the buying guide page but no changes had been made to it for well months or years. To make up for it some more words were added to the category page, but of cause there is only so many way you can fraise words about “nuts and bolts” without sounding a bit duplicate/re-writing. So what do I do now ?? Clearly the product category page is the one we like to rank highest with the guide a close 2nd. Most customer don’t need the buying guide but it is good to have and great support as we got lot of good comments from customer who read it. Made a link to the buying guide from the category page and wise verses. The category page got an embedded video. Moz list the page authority for the category page to 16 and 1 for the buying guide but clearly G see it differently. Already tried to change the Meta Tag Title and Description a little but it is hard to do if the word “Nuts Bolts” is to appear in the description or people don’t know what to expect. Could just insert a “do not index” for the buying guide but not a good long term solution. Unfortunately I am out of imagination at this point. Any good suggestions ?? Thanks, Kim Any good suggestions ???
Technical SEO | | KimX0 -
Duplicate content pages on different domains, best practice?
Hi, We are running directory sites on different domains of different countries (we have the country name in the domain name of each site) and we have the same static page on each one, well, we have more of them but I would like to exemplify one static page for the sake of simplicity. So we have http://firstcountry.com/faq.html, http://secondcountry.com/faq.html and so on for 6-7 sites, faq.html from one country and the other have 94% similarity when checked against duplicate content. We would like an alternative approach to canonical cause the content couldn´t belong to only one of this sites, it belongs to all. Second option would be unindex all but one country. It´s syndicated content but we cannot link back to the source cause there is none. Thanks for taking the time in reading this.
Technical SEO | | seosogood0 -
How to implement schema.org for different hotel rooms types
I'm working on a resort that has different type of rooms available. Does anyone know how to use schema.org to set it a hotel with different hotel room types. I looked at the hotel schema but I did not see any room types. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ppapola0 -
Duplicate Page Content but where?
Hi All Moz is telling me I have duplicate page content and sure enough the PA MR mT are all 0 but it doesnt give me a link to this content! This is the page: http://www.orsgroup.com/index.php?page=Scanning-services But I cant find where the duplicate content is other than on our own youtube page which I will get removed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnjh9jkAWuA Can anyone help please? Andy
Technical SEO | | ORS-Group0 -
Updating content on URL or new URL
High Mozzers, We are an event organisation. Every year we produce like 350 events. All the events are on our website. A lot of these events are held every year. So i have an URL like www.domainname.nl/eventname So what would you do. This URL has some inbound links, some social mentions and so on. SO if the event will be held again in 2013. Would it be better to update the content on this URL or create a new one. I would keep this URL and update it because of the linkvalue and it is allready indexed and ranking for the desired keyword for that event. Cheers, Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
I am Posting an article on my site and another site has asked to use the same article - Is this a duplicate content issue with google if i am the creator of the content and will it penalize our sites - or one more than the other??
I operate an ecommerce site for outdoor gear and was invited to guest post on a popular blog (not my site) for a trip i had been on. I wrote the aritcle for them and i also will post this same article on my website. Is this a dup content problem with google? and or the other site? Any Help. Also if i wanted to post this same article to 1 or 2 other blogs as long as they link back to me as the author of the article
Technical SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Best Way to Handle - International Content - Different Language
Our site currently is focused in the USA and the entire site is in the English language. We have considered broadening our scope to include content from foreign countries - i.e. Brazil. What is the best way to approach this -- can we use our existing domain and just have a specific section of the site that is dedicated to a particular Country with content translated into that Country's predominant language? OR could this create SEO issues -- having a domain with both English and some other language? Would it be better to have this on a totally different domain with Country extension? This is totally foreign territory for me - bad pun intended. Any advice, help would be appreciated. Thanks. Matt
Technical SEO | | MWM37720