Duplicate content issue with trailing / ?
-
Hi ,I did a SEOmoz Crawl Test and found most pages show twice, for example:
A: www.website.com/index.php/dog/walk
B: www.website.com/index.php/dog/walk/
I've checked Google Analytics and 90% of organic search traffic arrives on the URLs with the trailing slash (B).
Question 1: Can I assume I've a duplicate content problem?
Question 2: Is it best to do 301 redirects from the 'non trailing slash' pages to the 'trailing slash pages'?
Question 3: For some reason every web page has a '/index.php' in it (see A&B) above. No idea why. Should it be a SEO concern?
Kind regards and thank you in advance
Nigel
-
Hi Nigel
You only need to 301 one of the pages, 301 is indicating a permanent move, so in the case you outlined above,
I would 301, A to B the decisions to use B was based soly off the value of the url you indicated. If for any reason you prefer the url's not use trailing slash then use A.
It also would not hurt to add a canonical tag to B
To be clear here, whether you use
website.com/index.php/dog/walk
or
website.com/index.php/dog/walk/
Does not matter as far as SEO is concerned, I would make my decision based off of which url has the highest position in Google, and be consistent with this method throughout my site.
Hope that helps,
-
Hi Irving
Thank you for your reply. You mention a good point regarding the sitemap.xml!
If I was to 301redirect pages A & B to a new page eg www.website.com/dog/walk/ then how would I also canonical A & B to the new page?
Surely once I have 301'd the A & B pages will be dead and redirecting traffic to the new page.
Kind regard and my apologies for any confusion.
Nigel
-
Yes, index.php should never show so 301 that plus the trailing slash to remove it
Ddefinitely canonical all of the pages to have the URL without the trailing slash
Make sure your sitemap xml files and internal linking structure does not have the trailing slash. if they do,, then fix them to reflect the proper URL
-
Thank you Highland & Donford.
Re my 3rd question, can I just clarify, should I now 301 redirect both A & B URLs to a new URL say www.website/com/dog/walk ?
Many thanks!
-
Question 1: Can I assume I've a duplicate content problem?
-YesQuestion 2: Is it best to do 301 redirects from the 'non trailing slash' pages to the 'trailing slash pages'?
-Yes 301 is best, barring that use rel="canonical" on the page you want to indexQuestion 3: For some reason every web page has a '/index.php' in it (see A&B) above. No idea why. Should it be a SEO concern?
-Yes, this is a concern, use the same method to deal with the problem. Directories on the server side are usually assumed to have an index, if not the server can choose what to display, this can be very bad sometimes. As such most CMS content management systems fix the problem by generating content for the index.php or .html pages. However, there can be duplicate content issues since there are 2 urls with the same content, use 301 to get rid of the index.php at directory levels, or use canonical tags.
Hope that helps,
Don
-
1. Google can generally tell the difference between pages that have syntactically similar URLs but it's considered a best practice to not make any engine do any guesswork whenever possible.
2. I would 301 one version just for uniformity but you should be fine as-is right now.
3. There's nothing wrong with that being in the URL. Google sees it as part of the URL and nothing more. I don't consider it aesthetic or user friendly but that's a different matter.
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
-
Duplicate Content and Subdirectories
Hi there and thank you in advance for your help! I'm seeking guidance on how to structure a resources directory (white papers, webinars, etc.) while avoiding duplicate content penalties. If you go to /resources on our site, there is filter function. If you filter for webinars, the URL becomes /resources/?type=webinar We didn't want that dynamic URL to be the primary URL for webinars, so we created a new page with the URL /resources/webinar that lists all of our webinars and includes a featured webinar up top. However, the same webinar titles now appear on the /resources page and the /resources/webinar page. Will that cause duplicate content issues? P.S. Not sure if it matters, but we also changed the URLs for the individual resource pages to include the resource type. For example, one of our webinar URLs is /resources/webinar/forecasting-your-revenue Thank you!
Technical SEO | | SAIM_Marketing0 -
Another Duplicate Content - eCommerce Question!
We are manufacturers of about 15 products and our website provides information about the products. We also offer them for sale on the site. Recently we partnered with a large eCommerce site that sells many of these types of products. They lifted descriptions from our site for theirs and are now selling our products. They have higher DA than us. Will this cause a ranking problem for us? Should we write unique descriptions for them? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Chris6610 -
Duplicate content
Hello mozzers, I have an unusual question. I've created a page that I am fully aware that it is near 100% duplicate content. It quotes the law, so it's not changeable. The page is very linkable in my niche. Is there a way I can build quality links to it that benefit my overall websites DA (i'm not bothered about the linkable page being ranked) without risking panda/dupe content issues? Thanks, Peter
Technical SEO | | peterm21 -
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 -
Duplicate page issue
Hi, i have a serious duplicate page issue and not sure how it happened and i am not sure if anyone will be able to help as my site was built in joomla, it has been done through k2, i have never come across this issue before i am seem to have lots of duplicate pages under author names, example http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker this page is showing the full articles which is not great for seo and it is also showing that there are hundreds more articles at the bottom on the semoz tool i am using, it is showing these as duplicates although there are hundreds of them and it is causing google to see lots of duplicate pages. Diane Walker
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker/Page-2 5 1 0
Diane Walker
http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker/Page-210 1 1 0
Diane Walker
http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker/Page-297 1 1 0
Diane Walker
http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker/Page-3 5 1 0
Diane Walker can anyone please help me to sort this important issue out.0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Very strange issue I noticed today. In my SEOMoz Campaigns I noticed thousands of Warnings and Errors! I noticed that any page on my website ending in .php can be duplicated by adding anything you want to the end of the url, which seems to be causing these issues. Ex: Normal URL - www.example.com/testing.php Duplicate URL - www.example.com/testing.php/helloworld The duplicate URL displays the page without the images, but all the text and information is present, duplicating the Normal page. I Also found that many of my PDFs seemed to be getting duplicated burried in directories after directories, which I never ever put in place. Ex: www.example.com/catalog/pdfs/testing.pdf/pdfs/another.pdf/pdfs/more.pdfs/pdfs/ ... when the pdfs are only located in a pdfs directory! I am very confused on how to fix this problem. Maybe with some sort of redirect?
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
SEO MOZ report showing duplicate content pages with without ending /
Hello the SEOMOZ report is showing me I have a lot of duplicate content and then proceeds listing almost every page on my site as showing with a URL with an ending "/" and without. I checked my sitemap and only one version is there, the one with "/". I have a Wordpress site. Any recommendations ? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | dpaq20110 -
Duplicate Content Home Page
Hello, I am getting Duplicate Content warning from SEOMoz for my home page: http://www.teacherprose.com http://www.teacherprose.com/index html I tried code below in .htaccess: redirect 301 /index.html http://www.teacherprose.com This caused error "too many re-directs" in browser Any thoughts? Thank You, Eric
Technical SEO | | monthelie10