3 Different Home Page URL's Being Indexed?
-
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- -
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...
-
Good stuff! Thanks again, Bevelwise!!
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Pages Not Showing Up In Search After Being Indexed....
Hello, I'm trying optimize my google search for local business in Fort Myers, FL area. I've created specific keywords that people are searching and have made my page title and on-page experience reflect this relevency. However, the page isn't appearing anywhere on google search even though search console has stated that the page has been indexed. My question is, how do I trouble shoot this so that I can appear in local search for these search terms?
On-Page Optimization | | scottgray06200 -
Create 100% new content in existing page/URL?
We have about 30 pages of content that we are hiding from the website as these articles had some issues. If these pages ranked well, would you recommend that the new content is written within these pages? Meaning, we would replace the content that's in those pages with the same topic and keywords. Or do you think it's best to start a new page instead?
On-Page Optimization | | kvillalobos0 -
Indexing pages after de-indexing them
I have been de-indexing duplicate content on my website which has almost 40 pages contain duplicate content from other websites. later on the website ranking drop down. so should i re index them or just wait ?
On-Page Optimization | | MohammadSabbagh0 -
On page SEO Strategy / What pages to use?
What is the best page to use for targeting your hard to rank keywords? The keyword phrases in question here are "Acrylic Tank Manufacturing", "Custom Aquariums", & "Acrylic Aquariums" As of right now we have created 3 separate pages for each one of these keyword phrases. http://seaquaticaquariums.com/custom-aquariums for "Custom Aquariums" http://www.seaquaticaquariums.com/custom-aquariums/acrylic-aquariums/ for "Acrylic Aquariums" http://www.seaquaticaquariums.com/services/acrylic-tank-manufacturing/ for "Acrylic Tank Manufacturing" Or are we better of using the home page http://www.seaquaticaquariums.com/ for the our main hard to rank for terms. Generally speaking I would think more people will link to our home page.
On-Page Optimization | | SeaQuatic0 -
Panda Smacked - now it's your turn
Hi all Ok so we were smacked by Panda way back in June 2011, and are recovering from it, (though definitely still not back up to pre-Panda levels). Since then we have: 1. Taken down a load of thin content pages. 2. Increased content. 3. Tried to reduce page template complexity. However, one of the issues we have is that we make money from Adsense, so don't want to reduce the number of ads - however, we may still be falling foul of Panda because of it. So, please take a look at this sample page and tear it /us apart: http://www.compactlaw.co.uk/free-legal-information/children/children-act-orders.html Thank you. And if we can ever help the community back, please just ask.
On-Page Optimization | | dexm100 -
The importance of the home page and subdirectories
I am getting myself quite confused. My home page and target for one of my main sets of keywords is actually located at: www.domain.net.au/keywords/default.aspx BUT I have loads of external links resolving to: www.domain.net.au/ I had assumed that the best practice for getting the best ranking for the keyword would be to Canoniclise the page to:www.domain.net.au/keywords/ Is that a good assumption ? Or will it only work if I can change all the inbound, external links as well ? Thanks -Mark
On-Page Optimization | | blinkybill0 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Content (index.htm)
I get an error of "**Issue:**Duplicate Page Content" for the following pages in the SEOMOZ Crawl Diagnostics. But these pages are the same one! Duhhhh.... Is there a way to hide this false error? http://www.stdtime.com/ http://www.stdtime.com/index.htm BTW, I also get "**Issue:**Duplicate Page Title" for this page. Another false error...
On-Page Optimization | | raywhite0 -
Is it good to have dashes in url's
When using keywords in url's for internal pages, isn't it a good idea to use dashes or underscores in the url between the keywords?
On-Page Optimization | | BradBorst0