Caps in URL creating duplicate content
-
Im getting a bunch of duplicate content errors where the crawl is saying
www.url.com/abc has duplicate at www.url.com/ABC
The content is in magento and the url settings are lowercase, and I cant figure out why it thinks there is duplicate consent. These are pages with a decent number of inbound links.
-
I checked and it is a magento feature to rewrite caps to lower case.
I added this to htaccess anyway
<code>RewriteMap lc int:tolower RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z] RewriteRule (.*) ${lc:$1} [R=301,L]</code>
One last question before I take this question to a magento forum - how can I look at a page with a caps URL and lower URL and see if they are really different pages or link to the same address.
When you change random letters to caps in our site it sends you to the right page but my browser still shows the mixed caps url instead of replacing with an all lower url - but is that really a different page or is the browser just not changing the caps display when it is really getting the lower case page ```
-
Hi John,
I checked the URL you sent me. You do have duplicate pages:
http://www.madebysurvivors.com/destiny
http://www.madebysurvivors.com/DESTINY
both work and return the same page..
I also tried clicking on other links on your site, and then just changing a few letters to the upper case something like this
http://www.madebysurvivors.com/LEArn-human-trafficking-slavery
and it returns the same page
From what I can tell its one of the features in Magento that is making this possible. I would go into settings and disable that setting that forces Magento to use lower case.
Then test it make sure that you DO get a 404 page if you change the letter case on any of your links. Once you test it and you do get a 404 page.
I'm not familiar with Magento so not sure if it has that option or not, but many CMS and ecommerce platforms have a field where you can specify the URL for that page, I would change that field to all lower case.
Test it again, if it works there is one more step that you have to do if you want to keep the same juice from the pages that had the uppercase URL.
You need to duplicate your pages, but you need to make sure that the URL address is the same as it was before (in all CAPS) and then do a 301 redirect to the new page which is in lower case.
Hope this helps and makes sense.
-
This is intended functionality in Magento. It's supposed to help the user experience, as a user can navigate to a page even if they aren't sure on the casing of the words.
Of course that's bad for SEO. You'll need to put in the concept of canonicalization. Here's a free extension by Yoast:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/canonical-url-for-magento.html
Cheers.
Update: seeing your response, your solution of putting in redirects wouldn't be possible. You'd have to cover all combinations of caps/non-caps, and well, that's more work than you should want :). As for why this happens, the uppercase character is being lowercased when checking if something in the database matches the URL. Again, this is intended functionality.
-
Looks like I do need some more help.
I get a redirect loop if I enter a redirect from
http://www.madebysurvivors.com/DESTINY
to
http://www.madebysurvivors.com/destiny
but I checked and there is no redirect the other way in our database or htaccess.
If I leave the redirect off I get duplicate content - but in the CMS parts of magento there is only one table for this page.
-
I actually moved all the content from a drupal install so I dont have that many URLs that have the problem. It looks like the faster way to do this is just redirects the caps to lower case as thats what we use elsewhere..
I dug into the underlying database and cant find any duplicate entries for these pages or odd redirects so I have no idea of the cause.
For some of the pages I think you are right that magento is moving caps down to lower, but there are a few others where it is lower to caps - but it was caps in the drupal site.
Anyway -good to know google sees them differently so Ill put in redirects. Its only about 20 pages
-
Hello John,
If you can provide us with a URL we might be able to dig in to see what is going on. Without it its almost impossible to tell. Also it doesn't matter if you have a decent number of inbound links, duplicate content only refers to pages with similar content. I'm not familiar with Magento platform so this is just a guess, when you created (or imported) pages or categories in Magento originally were they lowercased? If not its possible that Magento added them as all in CAPS and Magento might be forcing it to lower case, therefore you might have duplicates, but once again this is just a guess and without a URL to your site I doubt that someone will be able to help you further.
-
www.url.com/abc and www.url.com/ABC are two completely different pages according to Google
I would redirect any and all pages with capitals to the corresponding lower case URL's.
Dont worry about the link juice as it will pass over via the redirect. It will also be much better than having 2 identical pages competing with eachother (according to Google)
Greg
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
-
Who gets punished for duplicate content?
What happens if two domains have duplicate content? Do both domains get punished for it, or just one? If so, which one?
Technical SEO | | Tobii-Dynavox0 -
Duplicate content on charity website
Hi Mozers, We are working on a website for a UK charity – they are a hospice and have two distinct brands, one for their adult services and another for their children’s services. They currently have two different websites which have a large number of pages that contain identical text. We spoke with them and agreed that it would be better to combine the websites under one URL – that way a number of the duplicate pages could be reduced as they are relevant to both brands. What seamed like a good idea initially is beginning to not look so good now. We had planned to use CSS to load different style sheets for each brand – depending on the referring URL (adult / Child) the page would display the appropriate branding. This will will work well up to a point. What we can’t work out is how to style the page if it is the initial landing page – the brands are quite different and we need to get this right. It is not such an issue for the management type pages (board of trustees etc) as they govern both identities. The issue is the donation, fundraising pages – they need to be found, and we are concerned that users will be confused if one of those pages is the initial landing page and they are served the wrong brand. We have thought of making one page the main page and using rel canonical on the other one, but that will affect its ability to be found in the search engines. Really not sure what the best way to move forward would be, any suggestions / guidance would be much appreciated. Thanks Fraser .
Technical SEO | | fraserhannah0 -
Duplicate Content within Site
I'm very new here... been reading a lot about Panda and duplicate content. I have a main website and a mobile site (same domain - m.domain.com). I've copied the same text over to those other web pages. Is that okay? Or is that considered duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
Duplicate content or titles
Hello , I am working on a site, I am facing the duplicate title and content errors,
Technical SEO | | KLLC
there are following kind of errors : 1- A link with www and without www having same content. actually its a apartment management site, so it has different bedrooms apartments and booking pages , 2- my second issue is related to booking and details pages of bedrooms, because I am using 1 file for all booking and 1 file for all details page. these are the main errors which i am facing ,
can anyone give me suggestions regarding these issues ? Thnaks,0 -
How different does content need to be to avoid a duplicate content penalty?
I'm implementing landing pages that are optimized for specific keywords. Some of them are substantially the same as another page (perhaps 10-15 words different). Are the landing pages likely to be identified by search engines as duplicate content? How different do two pages need to be to avoid the duplicate penalty?
Technical SEO | | WayneBlankenbeckler0 -
Duplicate video content question
This is really two questions in one. 1. If we put a video on YouTube and on our site via Wistia, how would that affect our rankings/authority/credibility? Would we get punished for duplicate video content? 2. If we put a Wistia hosted video on our website twice, on two different pages, we would get hit for having duplicate content? Any other suggestions regarding hosting on Wistia and YouTube versus just Wistia for product videos would be much appreciated. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick1 -
How to prevent duplicate content in archives?
My news site has a number of excerpts in the form of archives based on categories that is causing duplicate content problems. Here's an example with the nutrition archive. The articles here are already posts, so it creates the duplicate content. Should I nofollow/noindex this category page along with the rest and 2011,2012 archives etc (see archives here)? Thanks so much for any input!
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
URL Duplicate Content Issues (Website Transition)
Hey guys, I just transitioned my website and I have a question. I have built up all the link juice around my old url styles. To give you some clarity: My old CMS rendered links like this: www.example.com/sweatbands My new CMS renders links like this: www.example.com/sweatbands/ My new CMS's auto-sitemap also generates them with the slash on the end. Also throughout the website the CMS links to them with the slash at the end and i link to them without the slash (because it's what i am used to). I have the canonical without the slash. Should I just 301 to the version with the slash before google crawls again? I'm worried that i'll lose all the trust and ranking i built up to the one without the slash. I rank very high for certain keywords and some pages house a large portion of our traffic. What a mess! Help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | Hyrule0