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.
/~username
-
Hello,
The utility on this site that crawls your site and highlights what it sees as potential problems reported an issue with /~username access seeing it as duplicate content i.e. mydomain.com/file.htm is the same as mydomain.com~/username/file.htm so I went to my server hosts and they disabled it using mod_userdir but GWT now gives loads of 404 errors.
Have I gone about this the wrong way or was it not really a problem in the first place or have I fixed something that wasn't broken and made things worse?
Thanks,
Ian
-
OK thanks for that.
Ian
-
I can't find any listing on google for the /~user name pages
In that case, you can safely ignore the issue if you are confident there are no links to those pages on your site.
-
Thank you for your response.
There are no links from anywhere that I control to it. The first I was aware that you could even access the site in this way was when the utility on this site reported it.
It causes no problems to the sites operation. The only links to the /~username pages are from other /~username pages except an obscure search engine links to a few pages.
I can't find any listing on google for the /~user name pages and in WMT it says "Generally, 404s don't harm your site's performance in search"
So in this case do I ignore it and the 404's will stop once it realises the other pages aren't there? (except links from external sites) or do I need to do something because its an SEO problem
-
If you see the issue in Google WMT, then somewhere a link to the /~username URL was found and crawled.
As a best practice, a link to the /~username URL should not be used on your site. Adding a canonical tag to your pages would have helped better manage this issue as well.
At this point, if those results were appearing in SERPs you can add a 301 redirect from the /~username URL to the correct one.
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
-
Alt Text for Interior Design / Architecture Firm
I'm looking to update the alt text on my company's website to increase traffic and qualified leads. I've done some research on my own, but the alt-text examples i find are really simple and pertain more to ecommerce (i.e. leather boat shoe). We're an archteicture and interior design firm so we sell our design services. One of our goals is to get more projects in florida. I understand the best way to do alt-text is to describe the photo in as much detail as possible. But would it also help to plug in our services? Here are some examples i've thought of (i've attached the photo i'm describing) 1. Bright and airy coastal modern Palm Beach living room with abstract statement lighting
Technical SEO | Sep 30, 2020, 2:10 AM | WorkshopAPD
2. Bright and airy coastal modern living room with abstract statement lighting by South Beach Interior Design Firm Workshop/APD J1x3AgC0 -
Help. Recently my organic traffic has dropped 40%. Any advice / ideas?
Lately my organic traffic has dropped significantly as well as my adsense revenue. The moz report says, for example, my traffic is down 40%, but I a still #1 for that keyword. Also, in the last week, suddenly my number of indexed pages doubled. We had done some page rewriting and maybe messed that up. We've fixed that though. Webmaster tools is still picking up all of our old pages and the new ones. Background: We recently launched our new responsive website in March. March income was about the same as February. April dropped off suddenly (maybe late march - no sure) When we changed site, we did do 301's for all the old pages to the new ones Any ideas or advice as to why my traffic and revenue has dropped off so sharply? Never submitted questions before - not sure if I am supposed to put urls here so if you just google Home Spelling Words - that's my website. Thanks everyone!!!
Technical SEO | Apr 10, 2015, 1:43 PM | kimtastic0 -
Do I use /es/, /mx/ or /es-mx/ for my Spanish site for Mexico only
I currently have the Spanish version of my site under myurl.com/es/ When I was at Pubcon in Vegas last year a panel reviewed my site and said the Spanish version should be in /mx/ rather than /es/ since es is for Spain only and my site is for Mexico only. Today while trying to find information on the web I found /es-mx/ as a possibility. I am changing my site and was planning to change to /mx/ but want confirmation on the correct way to do this. Does anyone have a link to Google documentation that will tell me for sure what to use here? The documentation I read led me to the /es/ but I cannot find that now.
Technical SEO | Mar 18, 2014, 2:53 PM | RoxBrock0 -
Canonical tag for Home page: with or without / at the end???
Setting up canonical tags for an old site. I really need advice on that darn backslash / at the end of the homepage URL. We have incoming links to the homepage as http://www.mysite.com (without the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/ (with the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/index.html I know that there should be 301 redirects to just one version, but I need to know more about the canonical tags... Which should the canonical tag be??? (without the backslash) or (with the backslash) Thanks for your help! 🙂
Technical SEO | Jul 10, 2013, 1:26 PM | GregB1230 -
What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?
Now that Google considers subdomains as part of the TLD I'm a little leery of testing robots.txt with something like: staging.domain.com
Technical SEO | Oct 6, 2011, 10:55 PM | fthead9
User-agent: *
Disallow: / in fear it might get the www.domain.com blocked as well. Has anyone had any success using robots.txt to block sub-domains? I know I could add a meta robots tag to the staging.domain.com pages but that would require a lot more work.0 -
Redirecting blog.<mydomain>.com to www.<mydomain>.com\blog</mydomain></mydomain>
This is more of a technical question than pure SEO per se, but I am guessing that some folks here may have covered this and so I would appreciate any questions. I am moving from a WordPress.com-based blog (hosted on WordPress) to a WordPress installation on my own server (as suggested by folks in another thread here). As part of this I want to move from the format blog.<mydomain>.com to www.mydomain.com\blog. I have installed WordPress on my server and have imported posts from the hosted site to my own server. How should I manage the transition from first format to the second? I have a bunch of links on Facebook, etc that refer to URLs of the blog..com format so it's important that I redirect.</mydomain> I am running DotNetNuke/WordPress on my own IIS/ASP.Net servers. Thanks. Mark
Technical SEO | Sep 25, 2011, 7:56 PM | MarkWill0 -
On a dedicated server with multiple IP addresses, how can one address group be slow/time out and all other IP addresses OK?
We utilize a dedicated server to host roughly 60 sites on. The server is with a company that utilizes a lady who drives race cars.... About 4 months ago we realized we had a group of sites down thanks to monitoring alerts and checked it out. All were on the same IP address and the sites on the other IP address were still up and functioning well. When we contacted the support at first we were stonewalled, but eventually they said there was a problem and it was resolved within about 2 hours. Up until recently we had no problems. As a part of our ongoing SEO we check page load speed for our clients. A few days ago a client who has their site hosted by the same company was running very slow (about 8 seconds to load without cache). We ran every check we could and could not find a reason on our end. The client called the host and were told they needed to be on some other type of server (with the host) at a fee increase of roughly $10 per month. Yesterday, we noticed one group of sites on our server was down and, again, it was one IP address with about 8 sites on it. On chat with support, they kept saying it was our ISP. (We speed tested on multiple computers and were 22MB down and 9MB up +/-2MB). We ran a trace on the IP address and it went through without a problem on three occassions over about ten minutes. After about 30 minutes the sites were back up. Here's the twist: we had a couple of people in the building who were on other ISP's try and the sites came up and loaded on their machines. Does anyone have any idea as to what the issue is?
Technical SEO | Sep 4, 2011, 7:13 AM | RobertFisher0 -
/index.php in sitemap? take it out?
Hi Everyone, The following was automatically generated at xml-sitemaps.com Should I get rid of the index.php url from my sitemap? If so, how do I go about redirecting it in my htaccess ? <url><loc>http://www.mydomain.ca/</loc></url>
Technical SEO | Jun 20, 2011, 3:01 PM | RogersSEO
<url><loc>http://www.mydomain.ca/index.php</loc></url> thank you in advance, Martin0