Duplicate product urls
-
Our site automatically creates shorter urls for the products. There is a rel canonical tag in place, but webmaster tools shows these urls have duplicate title tags. Here is an example: http://www.colemanfurniture.com/holden-desk.htm http://www.colemanfurniture.com/writing-desks-secretary-desks/holden-desk.htm Should the longer url be redirected to the shorter one?
-
And to add to Matt's reply, not all search engines recognize canonical tags, so if it is a dupe content issue, then 301s are vital.
-
Thanks Matt.
-
Alan - I did exactly the same thing... it was the wrong URL in the original post:
http://www.colemanfurniture.com/office-furniture/writing-desks-secretary-desks/holden-desk.htm
-Matt
-
Are the longer links historical or are they being pointed to from somewhere on your site?
If it's the latter I'd advise sorting out your internal linking structure so that it's the shorter URL that is pointed to. A canonical should be enough, but it's only a pointer... so if Google sees loads of links going to a page that is canonicalised which, in turn, points to a page with virtually no juice then it may be that the tag is ignored.
It's also worth finding out if it's just webmaster tools showing the error by checking if both pages are indexed. If they are, you definitely have a duplicate content issue... if not then it may just be a reporting error.
- Matt
-
When I went to the longer version URL just now, it took me to your "404 not found" page.
If the URL you want to use is the short version, then the long version should have a 301 redirect implemented pointing to the short version.
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
Hello Moz Quick question. Can I copy and paste a paragraph of text (100 words) from my main category page into my products without hurting SEO of the category page? The content on my category page is so good I don't want to take chances as this is what I will be ranking for. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | crocman0 -
URL Structure on Category Pages
Hi, Currently, we having the following URL Structure o our product pages: All Products Pages: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/283/All_Products.html Category Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/4/Clothing.html Product Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/product/LOAD-HE-WOM/Assorted-High-End-Women-Clothing-Lots.html?cid=4 Since we are going to use another frontend system, we are thinking about re-working on this URL Structure, using something like this: All Products Pages: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/ Category Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/category/ Product Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/category/product-title/ I understand this is better for SEO and user experience. However, we already have good traffic on the current URL Structure. Should we use same left-side filters on Category Pages as in All Products Page? Since we are using Faceted Navigation, when users filter the Category (e.g. Clothing) they will see same page as Clothing Category Page. Is that an issue for Duplicate Content? Since we are a wholesale company - I understand is using "/wholesale/products/" in URL for all product pages a good idea? If so, should we avoid word "wholesale" in product-title to avoid repeated word in URL? For us, SKU in URL helps the company employees and maybe some clients identify the link. However, what do you think of using the SEO-friendly product-title, and 301 redirect it to www.viatrading.com/BRTA-LN-DISHRACKS/, so 1st link is only used by company members and Canonicalized 2nd is the only one seen by general public? Thank you,
On-Page Optimization | | viatrading10 -
Changing a page url
I have a page that ranks well (#4) for a good keyword. However, the url has the keyword in it but is misspelled. I would like to change the url to have the correct spelling but do not want to lose the ranking that I have. What is the best and safest way to proceed?
On-Page Optimization | | bhsiao0 -
URL Length
I know a URL should "technically" shorter than 75 characters. Does that include the http://www.domainname.com ? Thank you 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | Libra0130 -
Temp redirects of homepage URLs
Working on a site for a client and the CMS provider has all variants of their domain (.co.uk & .com and / and http:// etc) temp redirecting to the /default.aspx homepage. I know in theory that this means no Google Juice is being passed to the final location page, does this mean that all backlinks that point to their domain are not actually passing Juice onto the homepage? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Switch_Digital0 -
Product sorting and dynamic urls
On our weekly SEOmoz crawls, we get thousands of warnings about overly dynamic URLs as a result of our product sorting options at the top of our category pages. It seems like the ability to sort products by price, name, etc., is nice for the customer. For SEO is this really a problem or can we ignore these warnings?
On-Page Optimization | | teatable0 -
Absolute URLs
Hi, this is a very basic question but I want to confirm, as I remembered it was consider a good practice to use the absolute version of your links when linking to other pages of your site, not for any issue related to passing authority or PageRank, but because if someone scraps your content then they would take the links as well (as if they didn't remove them). Have the practices for internal linking with absolute or realtive URLs changed in any way? Which is the best way? absolute or relative? is there any harm for using the relative version? Relative: Absolute: [](<strong><em>http://www.cheapdomain.com/myfolder/mypage.html)[](<strong><em>http://www.cheapdomain.com/myfolder/mypage.html) [Thanks!](<strong><em>http://www.cheapdomain.com/myfolder/mypage.html)
On-Page Optimization | | andresgmontero0 -
Site URL's
We are redeveloping our website, and have the option to amend URLs (with 301 redirects from old URL to new), so my question is: Would 'golfsite.com/golf-clubs' achieve superior rankings than 'golfsite.com/clubs' for the search term 'golf clubs' if all other factors were the same? Should the URL reflect the intended search term wherever possible?
On-Page Optimization | | swgolf1230