Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Why do I have 2 different URL's for the same page - is this good practice?
-
Hi GuysMy father is currently using a programmer to build his new site. Knowing a little about SEO etc, I was a little suspicious of the work carried out. **Anyone with good programming and SEO knowledge, please offer your advice!**This page http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/gallery-range-wood-flooring/ which is soon to be http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/ you'll see has a number of different products. The products on this particular page have been built into colour categories like thishttp://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/lights-greys http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/beiges http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/darks-blacks This is fine. Eventually when we add to our selection of woods, we'll easily segment each product into "colour categories" for users to easily navigate to. My question is - Why do I have 2 different URL's for the same page - is this good practice? Please see below... Visible URL - http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns/cipressa/Below is the permalink seen in Word Press for this page also.Permalink: http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns-engineered-wood/cipressa/and in the Word Press snippet shows the same permalink urlCipressa | Engineered Brown Wood | The Wood Gallerieswww.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns-engineered-wood/cipressa/
Buy Cipressa Engineered Brown Wood, available at The Wood Galleries, London. Provides an Exceptional Foundation for Elegant Décor, Extravagant ..
If this is completely ok and has no negative search impact - then I'm happy. If not what should I advise to my programmer to do?
Your help would be very much appreciated.
Regards
Faye
-
The site has been in progress for months now. During this time the company has developed some outstanding suppliers and subsequently more products have been added. Because of this we had to rethink the website structure by adding product categories. This has allowed us to implement cleaner urls which are better for SEO, as well as categorising our products which will provide a better user experience for our customers. It also provides the platform to add more products in the future.
I really appreciate you help Linda. I wanted to ask questions on here before getting in touch with my programmer.
This has confirmed my concerns as to "why" this has happened.
Thank you.
-
Agreed, no one should do 301 redirects for no reason. As I asked earlier, why does the other URL exist? If this is all being set up new, it should only be using the new, well-organized path. (Unless there are multiple paths that one can go through to arrive at that page and the developer wants them all to resolve to one, clean URL.) I think your best bet would be to just ask your programmer why.
-
Hi Linda
I'm aware of the purposes of 301's, but why do we have this, is the question? This is a company that has yet to begin advertising or trading, so there is no relevance its purposes?
Sure, if this page had link juice pointing to it, then a 301 would be required of course. But for a new start up, with completely unique pages - I'm not so sure my programmer is implementing best practice.
-
There is a URL: http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns-engineered-wood/cipressa/ and it's been around for a while, maybe has some links, built up some authority.
Now the organization of the site is being improved and the better URL: http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns/cipressa/ is to be used for the content that is on that page.
How does the authority of the old page get to the new page? With a 301 redirect. If this is not done, when someone goes to the old URL (maybe it's linked from somewhere, maybe they have a bookmark), they get a 404 error. When Google looks at links that go to the old URL, it wants to credit the links to that page, but that page does not exist anymore as far as Google knows. Google does not know there is a new page with the same information.
For you, the page is that one post in Wordpress or wherever and that stays the same—you are just renaming it. For Google, those two URLs are different pages and in order to tell Google that the one has become the other, you need to 301 redirect it.
-
Hi O2C
Forgive me but I disagree.
Canonical – Hey, (most) Search Engines: I have multiple versions of this page (or content), please only index this version. I'll keep the others available for people to see, but don't include them in your index and please pass credit to my preferred page.
We do not have multiple page versions which are the same, just the one unique for each - hence my "redirect" concern.
-
I would definitely add rel canonical tags to the website pages to let Google know which is the original page as Robert has suggested.
-
Hi Linda
Thanks for your input regarding this.
The only URL we require is http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns/cipressa/. This is based on our organisation of each product by "type" - "colour" - "brand name".
http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/lights-greys/
http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/beiges/
http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns/
http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/darks-blacks
We have the same for other products, http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/parquet-reclaimed/lights-greys/ and http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/prefinished-wood/lights-greys/ - and so on.
All that we require is for each URL to be changed accordingly, not to be redirected with a 301? As far as I'm aware, this page is not needed, is not part of our structure, but still exists as a 301.. Permalink: http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns-engineered-wood/cipressa/ ??
-
The URL that is being redirected to is the cleaner URL and also seems to make sense organizationally, which is why I would have gone with that structure from the start.
The question here is why does the other URL exist? Was the older site using that format? In that case, the new programmer is setting up a better organized structure for your father and doing the appropriate redirects, which is a good thing. The new URL will not be an incorrect URL, it will be the correct URL for that page.
-
Is a 301 redirect really necessary for a site such as this? I would like to know if what has been implemented is good practice?
I also do not want to "advertise" what is effectively an incorrect url (however similar), as this will be seen seen in the search engines?
Another possible downside of the 301 is that it does sometimes take a while for the search engines to attribute a page with the search authority of your the original page.
It seems to me a 301 redirect is not "best practice" for a new site with 70 individual "unique" products?
-
Hi Faye,
It looks like the 2nd URL you provided is already 301 redirecting to the first URL so you shouldn't have to worry about it.
Hope that helps!
-
That permalink already 301 redirects to the visible URL in your example and wouldn't cause duplicate content. Sometimes in order to show a nicer-looking link people will use aliases. I do not know why in this case the two structures are needed since it seems the visible link could handle the categories, but then I do not know what all the complexities are—you could ask the programmer why.
-
To answer your question: No, it's not okay. Duplicate content is to be avoided. Ask your programmer to do a 301 redirect one of these pages to another, that automatically redirects users and the GoogleBot, or at least add an canonical url meta tag which defines which page is the "original" or "canonical" version for the content.
See more at Google Support.
As to why it is happening. Difficult to be precise but would venture that one of the URL-s might be a category "page" that gets created automatically, with an url thanks to your page's category structure and the other a real editable "page".
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 we rename and update a page or create a new page entirely?
Hi Moz Peoples! We have a small site with a simple site navigation, with only a few links on the nav bar. We have been doing some work to create a new page, which will eventually replace one of the links on the nav bar. The question we are having is, is it better to rename the existing page and replace its content and then wait for the great indexer to do its thing, or perm delete the page and replace it with the new page and content? Or is this a case where it really makes no difference as long as the redirects are set up correctly?
On-Page Optimization | | Parker8180 -
Content hidden behind a 'read all/more..' etc etc button
Hi Anyone know latest thinking re 'hidden content' such as body copy behind a 'read more' type button/link in light of John Muellers comments toward end of last year (that they discount hidden copy etc) & follow up posts on Search Engine Round Table & Moz etc etc ? Lots of people were testing it and finding such content was still being crawled & indexed so presumed not a big deal after all but if Google said they discount it surely we now want to reveal/unhide such body copy if it contains text important to the pages seo efforts. Do you think it could be the case that G is still crawling & indexing such content BUT any contribution that copy may have had to the pages seo efforts is now lost if hidden. So to get its contribution to SEO back one needs to reveal it, have fully displayed ? OR no need to worry and can keep such copy behind a 'read more' button/link ? All Best Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Duplicate Content with ?Page ID's in WordPress
Hi there, I'm trying to figure out the best way to solve a duplicate content problem that I have due to Page ID's that WordPress automatically assigns to pages. I know that in order for me to resolve this I have to use canonical urls but the problem for me is I can't figure out the URL structure. Moz is showing me thousands of duplicate content errors that are mostly related to Page IDs For example, this is how a page's url should look like on my site Moz is telling me there are 50 duplicate content errors for this page. The page ID for this page is 82 so the duplicate content errors appear as follows and so on. For 47 more pages. The problem repeats itself with other pages as well. My permalinks are set to "Post Name" so I know that's not an issue. What can I do to resolve this? How can I use canonical URLs to solve this problem. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | SpaMedica0 -
Why is my contact us page ranking higher than my home page?
Hello, It doesn't matter what keyword I put into Google (when I'm not signed in and have cleaned down my browsing history) the contact us page ranks higher than the home page. I'm not sure why this is, the home page has a higher page authority, more links and more social media shares, the website is an established one. When I have checked Google Analytics my home page gets more people landing on it than the contact us page. It looks like people are ignoring the contact us page and scrolling down until they find the home page. I'd appreciate any help or advice you might have. Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | mblsolutions2 -
H2's vs Meta description
in some of my serp results the h2's are showing up instead of the meta description. i have read that H2's arent really valid anymore. can someone clarify this for me?
On-Page Optimization | | dhanson240 -
Hey guys! I was looking at adding the H1 tag lower on the page than the H2 tag because I want the top bit to be a call to action. Is this proper practice?
Hey guys! I was looking at adding the H1 tag lower on the page than the H2 tag because I want the top bit to be a call to action. Is this proper practice?
On-Page Optimization | | Web3Marketing870 -
How to properly remove pages and a category from Google's index
I want to remove this category http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/ and all the pages in that category (e.g. http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/7386.html ) from Google's index. I used the following string in the "Reomval URS" section in Google Webmaster Tools: http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/* is that correct or I better use http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/ ? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | VinceWicks0 -
Has anyone had experience with the Wix platform and it's SEO qualities?
Wix offers an inexpensive, user friendly platform for building websites. Most of the site is flash, but Wix claims to be SEO friendly. I'm all ears for your feedback and experience with Wix.
On-Page Optimization | | ksracer0